Pawlicker's Pleroma Experiment Blog on Nostr: There’s a very common saying on this side of the internet, “nothing ever ...
There’s a very common saying on this side of the internet, “nothing ever happens”. The phrase exists for a very good reason, every time you log into the internet you hear hype about how something big is going to happen ranging from war to climate change to something something Trump or Elon Musk, and yet nothing seemingly happens. All that hype just faded away, everyone forgets they were saying something is going to happen, and everyone moves onto the next thing. Someone gets arrested…but then released a day later. Some old white guy is killed by thugs but there’s no backlash against “activist district attorneys” let alone a “race war” as /pol/ wants. Some people drop dead or have serious side effects from the vaccine to the point an athlete nearly dies on TV…but nobody ever is charged and the only people who talk about this are online. An election can have suspicious results…and the only thing that happens is the people who make the voting machines sues anyone who says they’re insecure for a billion dollars (and the people who made a movie saying voting is insecure suddenly do a 180 on Twitter…funny how that works). The hockey stick graph hasn’t exactly happened yet, and instead everything else is a result of climate change. A leader can be voted into office and he will do nothing he said he’d do when he was elected (either neolibs doing nothing the online communists want or populist right wingers caving into everyone). Don’t get me started on how the Russia-Ukraine war was going to be WWIII or cause nukes to be dropped or something, or how the counter offensive would be successful, etc. Or how the current Israel war seems to be another example of trench warfare and nothing too crazy happening.
This has happened so many times at this point that after the great big COVID scare, “two more weeks” has become a sarcastic internet catchphrase along with the now repurposed right-wing boomer slogan “trust the plan”. The first one mocks how governments handled the COVID scare, and the second phrase mocks how boomer talk show hosts in particular love to talk about how “the right people are in control, trust the plan, everything you want to happen will if you sit back and do nothing” to lull boomers who prefer being passive into being even more passive (in particular referencing the QAnon scam, which was described by some as “hope porn” for boomers). But the main reason I’m bringing this up here has to do with Twitter and alternatives to it.
You see; it’s been a year now since Elon Musk bought Twitter and some e-celebs were making a big deal about how Twitter is going to die now, the servers are going to go offline now, it’s going to utterly collapse now, you just wait and see. My favorite e-celeb stunt was when one decided to put some cabbage/lettuce he bought at a store in front of a webcam for his “leaving Twitter forever” posts and was trying to take pics to see “would the lettuce rot by the time Twitter goes down”. It’s been a year now and we all know the answer to that one.
Twitter might slowly be boiling the frog, by forcing logins, temporarily breaking nitter.net, and of course Elon Musk going from the star of the media to hated by the world. After all, with Trump out of office, someone had to take his place and it’s easy to forget just what the media said about him years ago.
Musk grabs a coffee-table book published by The Onion and starts leafing through it, laughing hysterically. “In order to understand the essential truth of things,” he theorizes, “I think you can find it in The Onion and occasionally on Reddit.” Afterward, he asks excitedly, “Have you ever seen Rick and Morty?” And the conversation bounces from that animated show to South Park to The Simpsons to the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
See? That quirky real-life Tony Stark or modern-day Howard Hughes who is spearheading space travel even watches Rick and Morty and browses Reddit. He’s just like you and me.
But either way, Elon Musk has absolutely made the media angry nowadays and if you search his name, he has replaced Donald Trump as an object of hate like I said. So as a result, there’s a huge pent-up demand (at least in the eyes of some) for a new Twitter clone. Okay, I disagree. See; there isn’t as much as there was for the Tumblr porn ban. But to explain this, I’m going to define offshoot sites into two categories: Containment Sites and Reactionary Sites.Two kinds of sites: Reactionary and Containment sites
So what exactly is a containment site and what is (what I am terming) a reactionary site? To explain this; I’ll use real world examples for each to define each site. These two categories are not strict, and many websites such as 8chan/8kun fit the characteristics of both sites.
A containment site is a website which serves to “contain” a userbase from a different website for some reason or another. These websites are defined by various characteristics, including:
The website either solely exists to or serves the purpose of hosting a userbase that has been banned from numerous major websites.
The motive for making the site is solely due to users or discussion topics being banned from another site.
A userbase that repels people from outside this community for some reason or another.
Does not appeal to you if you’re not part of the audience banned.
Has a higher chance of having an echo chamber effect, a lower chance of being seen outside of said group, etc.
Growth depends on users being banned or censored from a website.
There are many examples of containment sites online, or websites that started as such. FurAffinity and Inkbunny both started as one, while pretty much all of the companies that fall under the “alt-tech” sphere for some reason or another (including Gab, Voat (dead), 8chan/8kun/whatever its latest incarnation is now, BitChute, and even Odysee/LBRY, Rumble, GiveSendGo, and many more) are known for having such an audience even if they did not intend on it. These websites do in fact gain easy audiences but for one reason; these users cannot go back to Twitter or other big tech sites. Therefore, these users are stuck on one site. There are plenty of issues with the containment site model. For example, these websites can have many security lapses due to a combination of mismanagement and a lack of intelligent staff, and multiple alt-tech sites were hacked which led to direct retaliation against users there as a result. GiveSendGo donators were harassed or had banking issues, Parler and Gab were hacked with the former having information on unauthorized protesters being sent to the FBI, and other sites have had hosting/banking issues as a result of being targeted. This isn’t just a thing with right wing political sites; FurAffinity has been targeted with spam attacks and InkBunny has had to openly make clear in the rules they do not want pedophiles signing up. Much of these websites are also known for a very distinct community that repels anyone outside the group signing up for it, leading to an echo chamber effect at times.
Other times, the topic that causes users to start a containment site doesn’t need to be politically loaded. There were a lot of topics the big name Pokemon forums like BMGf and Serebii Forums (or SPPf) were banning discussion of; with two that come to mind being ROM hacking and save file modding. PokeCommunity Forums and the Project Pokemon Forums built up communities solely on discussing these taboo topics. In particular, Project Pokemon started up based on discussion around the classic Pokemon save file modification utility PokeSAV and other Pokemon series hacking information, while PokeCommunity became the main hub for Pokemon ROM hacks and whatnot.
But most importantly, for these sites to pop up there has to be nowhere else for them to go. When Tumblr died nobody stepped up to the plate to make a similar site until it was years too late to make a dent (and even with some of these sites such as Cohost, the moderation is nowhere near as lax as it was during the golden age of Tumblr). Pillowfort never quite took off as the website was running into security issues (and is still paywalled), while Cohost literally launched in 2022; far too late to make a dent or impact. I’m fairly sure all the big Pokemon forums banning discussion of Pokemon leaks also led discussion to shift over to big tech run social media platforms due to their lax moderation of the time.
This is essential, because the problem with using any alternative website is that you run the very real risk of having zero exposure on said site. This is especially true if your site is blacklisted from search engines.
Reactionary sites (as I am defining it) are notable for something else. These websites were not started for people banned from another website but were started as a reaction towards something happening to another site. Maybe management sold the site out or screwed over staff/the users, but these sites exist for one of two reasons. The first type of these sites caters to a group banned from another site (but the users really want that site back), so they launch a site that’s just like the site they’re addicted to posting on but with hookers and blow. With a few exceptions, these sites aren’t that active because there is nothing on there for those banned from a big site such as Twitter, but also nothing that they can’t see on Twitter either. Sometimes they even cater to users of that site just angry at a certain person running the site. These sites are only successful if the original website goes down for good, or does something that makes the userbase schism like with ResetEra breaking off of NeoGAF to the point neither site has remotely the same culture anymore. Some such sites also end up as containment sites; with many SomethingAwful and a few Kiwi Farms offshoot sites being this way.
Some examples of a forum going down for good include AssemblerGames schisming off into several sites online (including ObscureGamers, which also lost users after high-profile drama) or DPReview nearly going down until it found a new buyer (A few sites started out as bunkers before DPReview was confirmed to be stable). 8chan’s months long shutdown also led to a schism of imageboard culture as the replacements would infight hard, and lots of bunkers and offshoots were set up as a result. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of this and to be honest I don’t know too much about what went on there, but I did see some of the same trends.
Some of the characteristics of a site such as this include:
The motive of making the site is either “revenge” towards the staff, or because a site’s demise seems imminent.
Tries to be “just like an old site” but better.
Oftentimes mimics the rules, UI, and moderation of the old site.
Tries to have a wider mass appeal and replace the other site
Can double as a containment site, but with fewer users in many cases.
Reactionary sites tend to have a history of not doing so well, namely due to their tendency to have all the disadvantages of a containment site but without the carrot of being able to say funny racial slurs, discuss banned topics, or posting banned artwork. These sites only do well if the original website goes down, and they’re started just in time to tell people this new site is where to go. I also hope you have the moderation and servers in place to handle the new userbase, the skids who want to hack your site, etc.A tale of two sites: Weasyl and Inkbunny
The nice part about having a blog is that I can talk about furry drama without a 14 year old in a Tap-Out T-Shirt cutting me off in a Discord call and calling me a degenerate autist while I’m explaining crazy things I saw online. In this case; I’m going to be talking about two furry art sites: one a reactionary site and one a containment site. So let’s talk about the background here; FurAffinity as an art site is absolutely terrible. The rules suck and are constantly being tightened for no reason, the backend is garbage, the site is missing numerous features literally everyone else has implemented years ago, let alone features that would be useful for the creative furry scene such as having a character list or something. It still chugs along for two reasons: the back catalogue (which is shrinking with new rules rolled out), and the fact that “everyone else uses it”. Oh, and Tumblr/Twitter were more attractive to artists than an obscure furry art site is because it has people using it.
The first website I’m going to take a look at is Weasyl, a very much reactionary furry art site. Now Weasyl is an art site you might not have heard of and this is for a very good reason. These days it’s languishing in obscurity. The Github account for it still gets commits, but the blog hasn’t gotten a post since 2021 and the Twitter account since 2020. In fact, a post on the lead dev/admin’s page asked if the site was still active/in active development. I am sure someone still uses it as a main site instead of as a website loaded up into PostyBirb, but for most furries it’s not even on their radar (someone will disagree with me on this). Searching FurAffinity.net brings up far more results in my Telegram client than Weasyl.com does anyway.
It’s a shame because Weasyl is in many ways the anti-furaffinity. The code is FOSS and you can see it being updated still. The website supports numerous and I mean numerous features FurAffinity does not, including especially high-res image uploading. It probably has better moderation than FurAffinity does, considering an AI can do it better I’m sure. But what really made Weasyl get hyped up was what happened in the mid-2010s with the furry fandom. See; FurAffinity notoriously went into a week or so of downtime with read-only mode, and then on top of that furaffinity was just badly run. This peaked with an infamous hack in 2016 leading to passwords being leaked. For years, furries were totally going to leave FurAffinity forever. Guides were made, reddit talked about moving off complete with manifestos that stated their issues with the site, and multiple
migration tools were made. Does this all sound familiar?
So; what happened to Weasyl to the point where it became as irrelevant as Mitsubishi cars are today? Well, it’s simple really. Weasyl only got two kinds of users: people who hated FurAffinity going down, and people who hated Dragoneer (but weren’t breaking the cub rule, more on this later). It also gets artists uploading high resolution copies of their artwork, for people who don’t want to touch Inkbunny, and for artists who don’t paywall it behind Patreon. But most importantly, Tumblr hadn’t banned porn yet and Twitter was looking awfully attractive, and so many more artists moved to sites where the users were. Free from the shackles of the furry containment site sphere, they could spread their artwork far and wide.
But most importantly; Weasyl offered nothing that you can’t find on FurAffinity or big social media sites. FurAffinity has notoriously banned art of “cub” (essentially furry lolisho) characters, and Weasyl followed suit from day one it seems. There was no controversy because it was banned to begin with. Unfortunately, these rules are also notoriously vague and tend to be a matter of “does the admin like this”.
So what happens when an art site allows this art? Well, you’ll end up with the curious case of Inkbunny.net. See, Inkbunny is also a furry art gallery that’s also more advanced than FurAffinity is but with a difference; cub art is allowed without humans. In fact, FurAffinity banning such art is exactly why Inkbunny got so popular and has as many users as it does. There are users who will only post to Inkbunny as a result, but the problem is merely mentioning that kind of art is bound to provoke two kinds of people, a crowd that says drawings have rights and the other that really is obsessive about jacking it to cartoons. As a result, many artists are on only Inkbunny, and many refuse to touch the site because blacklisting the cub art isn’t enough, it must not exist on the same site as them. There’s also plenty of creepy users as a result of the cub thing, managing to top Japan’s horniest otakus who managed to turn into a meme.
To add to this, every time something like FurAffinity tightening rules on what art is allowed happens, Inkbunny gets hammered with new traffic because it’s seen as a place that will let you upload whatever with minimal moderation.
Essentially; the containment site model is a blessing and a curse. It ensures a website will always have new traffic and a new audience, but it also appeals mostly to those banned from a different website. A reactionary website can only work if the original site goes offline, as if you’re not banned from the original site you have no reason to use this offshoot site. This is why Inkbunny is still a known name in the furry sphere. Inkbunny caters to an audience banned from mainstream furry sites; at the expense of an audience who sees no reason to sign up and is likely actively repulsed by the users there.The fediverse and containment sites
So what about the fediverse and it’s role in all of this? Well, I like to see the fediverse as a containment site. The point I made about two fediverses also applies here. One segment of the fediverse is banned from Twitter, and one is signing up because Elon Musk is a meanie. There’s a lot of parallels to the furry art sites here with instances. To reframe my post about the two fediverses here; one side of the fediverse is here because they cannot go back to Twitter, and one side is here because they hate Elon Musk. On top of that, even the left wing side of the fediverse is fractured as a result of there being two kinds of users: “normies” who listen to NPR/Freespeech.org, and the diehard schizophrenic leftists who will harass you if you don’t use CWs or alt-text on your post. I mean, for those people maybe the fedi acts as a sort of containment site, for internet leftists so neurotic that all their half-hearted friends ghost them.
The more open side of the fediverse absolutely loves being a containment site for specific people, and aside from Alex Gleason (who has similar goals to that of Eugen with different stances on speech/trans issues/veganism) many of them wouldn’t have it any other way. One instance will have users asking you to say a racial slur when you sign up. Another instance has admins who will nuke your account if you don’t post your fetishes after signing up. These in a way serve to ward out normies and infiltrators to some degree, given many would not want to be caught dead saying racial slurs. They want to find people like them online, and they know it’s a source of quality user growth. They know someone joining because they’re banned from Twitter will stick around, because they cannot go back to Twitter.
Yet at the same time, it’s easy to see why the fediverse can repel normies. Many boomers who voted for Biden will struggle to understand why a bunch of online users are harassing them about “CWs” and “alt-text” or something and why doing anything makes people offended. On the other hand, boomers who voted for Trump don’t understand why every online right community is full of people who will happily tell you why everything you learned in school was a lie, or will chew you out for posting “pull yourselves up by the bootstraps” or “but how does this personally affect you”.
As of now, much of the fediverse is containment, be it from lolisho artists/fans or schizophrenic political “extremists”. But what about 5 years down the line?Threads and the Google Talk scare
This is where it gets interesting. See; lately Facebook has decided to integrate their walled garden Twitter clone known as Threads with ActivityPub.
One argument against Threads federating boils down to the classic “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” policy Microsoft used to practice, and compares it to Google Talk. Now Google as a company is very notorious for creating something, and then killing it just a few months later. It’s to the point where there’s a website called the “Google Graveyard” listing products Google killed off. One such product was Google Talk; which was an XMPP messaging service Google ran, competing with AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, and numerous less popular (in the USA) messengers such as ICQ, Xfire, and more. It didn’t exactly seem to be that popular given nobody I knew back then used it, and it was killed one day when Google replaced the multiple chat services they had with Hangouts (which in Google fashion was also killed off for yet another app called Google Chat and Google Meet or something, why can’t Google be consistent?).
But the canon as written by users online, regardless of how true it is or regardless of Google’s track record goes “once upon a time there was this chat client named XMPP, it was the best thing ever, and then Google ruined it” and this is backed up by a blogpost that claims this, along with a viral Mastodon post parroting this and saying that users will be forced into threads to federate. In fact, it pins the issues on XMPP solely on Google almost, and not the problems with the protocol, how it took a while to add features, how much of the world sees XMPP as jank thanks to Avaya/Cisco software at their IT wagecage, and more. But most importantly; this was similar to the issue of say, Mastodon.social having most of the users on the fedi:
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
While XMPP still exist and is a very active community, it never recovered from this blow. Too high expectation with Google adoption led to a huge disappointment and a silent fall into oblivion. XMPP became niche. So niche that when group chats became all the rage (Slack, Discord), the free software community reinvented it (Matrix) to compete while group chats were already possible with XMPP. (Disclaimer: I’ve never studied the Matrix protocol so I have no idea how it technically compares with XMPP. I simply believe that it solves the same problem and compete in the same space as XMPP).
Now when you look at the “instance question”, instance blocking, and how many of these instances just so happen to go down because the admin quit, it’s easy to see why everyone would trust Google for XMPP instead. If you had to ask your coworker if he would trust an internet tough guy or the powertripping manager being in control of his online life or Google, he’d trust Google because he has “nothing to hide”. The post then compares Facebook joining the fediverse to a company with no focus and Microsoft. But the cherry on top is this part:
I know we all dream of having all our friends and family on the Fediverse so we can avoid proprietary networks completely. But the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.
By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. They are the master of that game. They are trying to bring everyone in their field, to make people compete against them using the weapons they are selling.
Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.
Right; that’s cool. Let’s see what his instance is blocking:
Well we do have a few instances blocked, but I’m sure if more people talked to his instance or his instance was in the anglosphere they’d be blocked, given it’s a smallish instance with only 2.9k users. Let’s see how the instance bugged by Meta to federate fares:
And what about the one with the guy making the viral thread and linking that post saying fedi should be free speech:
Are you noticing something? These instances only approve of the freespeech.org kind of free speech, the free speech that’s as free as the local radio station owned by Clear Channel playing only approved music is edgy and anti-establishment.
I’m very curious to watch this unfold, given the rumors that Facebook is also being selective about who they federate with (I’m sure they don’t want people posting many kinds of memes), and how internet leftists act online. What I do know is Eugen is onboard with it.
But what does this all have to do with what I said earlier? Right. So basically; there’s now big tech companies dipping their toes in this new defederated thing. I suspect there will be people flocking to these because just like mastodon.social, being on there means you’re far less likely to be blocked if you are a system enjoyer. After all, right now it’s really trendy to talk about how the “hate speech and disinformation” on Twitter, but telling someone the fediverse has none of that is like pranking someone by telling them that the part of town you know is sketchy is a beautiful neighborhood you can walk at night or leave your door unlocked in.
But with how big tech companies and the like think Mastodon is the future, who knows how it’ll be in a few years when it’s no longer cool, and associated with the chuds and lolisho posters. It sounds crazy, but look what happened to crypto. One day it was the cool thing that was going to change the world…the next thing you know the SPLC is trying to track everyone on their shitlist who uses it:
Maybe that will be the fedi in 5 years if shitty startups and big tech can’t exactly grasp it; something extremely tainted that nobody who isn’t in the in group will want to touch, maybe it’ll be normal for instances to have to run with no frontends or with APIs locked down to avoid censorship, who knows. After all; this is part and parcel with running a containment site. Right next to names of someone who could be considered remotely far-right like Kevin MacDonald and Richard Spencer, are names of libertarians and sites run by such including Luke Smith, Kiwi Farms, Cody Wilson, altcensored.com (a website that in their own words is nonpolitical and just logs videos YouTube hides/censors), and even boomer conservatives like Laura Loomer.
I guess my point here is, the last remnants of the internet are on containment sites, websites made in reaction to other sites fail because they offer nothing if you are not banned from Twitter, and I hope if you’re for free speech you’re willing to see your picture and real name next to that of Alex Jones, Andrew Anglin, and Kiwi Farms because that’s what you’ll have to put up with (and many people online just aren’t).Musk always wins
So how am I going to end this schizopost? By saying that no matter what you do, Elon Musk always wins and so do walled gardens. Everyone on the fediverse is constantly infighting and trying to do every song and dance to avoid being blocked; thanks to the consensus filter. You don’t want to be a bigot, do you?
Case in point; a friend’s artist girlfriend is on the fedi and BlueSky. He cannot follow her on fedi or share his art because of signed fetches and being on mastodon.art’s blocklist (she uses Mastodon.art). But on BlueSky, the monolithic platform, he can follow and reshare her art. Sure, you’ll get jannied from Bluesky if you post lolisho or get report bombed or similar. But since you’re blocked from another site for something that the website owner decided (with no way to negotiate it), this situation will keep playing itself out more and more until you go to a monolithic website where you don’t have to worry about instance blocks, only if you’re banned or not.
Basically, Elon Musk always wins if you don’t say funny words online that start with an N. No matter where you go, you’ll find out you can’t repost the guy you liked because he used this instance that blocks stuff (and he won’t move instances), and you’ll be back. He will too when he asks why nobody interacts with his posts.
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/12/18/the-logic-of-offshoot-sites-a-pure-schizopost/
This has happened so many times at this point that after the great big COVID scare, “two more weeks” has become a sarcastic internet catchphrase along with the now repurposed right-wing boomer slogan “trust the plan”. The first one mocks how governments handled the COVID scare, and the second phrase mocks how boomer talk show hosts in particular love to talk about how “the right people are in control, trust the plan, everything you want to happen will if you sit back and do nothing” to lull boomers who prefer being passive into being even more passive (in particular referencing the QAnon scam, which was described by some as “hope porn” for boomers). But the main reason I’m bringing this up here has to do with Twitter and alternatives to it.
You see; it’s been a year now since Elon Musk bought Twitter and some e-celebs were making a big deal about how Twitter is going to die now, the servers are going to go offline now, it’s going to utterly collapse now, you just wait and see. My favorite e-celeb stunt was when one decided to put some cabbage/lettuce he bought at a store in front of a webcam for his “leaving Twitter forever” posts and was trying to take pics to see “would the lettuce rot by the time Twitter goes down”. It’s been a year now and we all know the answer to that one.
Twitter might slowly be boiling the frog, by forcing logins, temporarily breaking nitter.net, and of course Elon Musk going from the star of the media to hated by the world. After all, with Trump out of office, someone had to take his place and it’s easy to forget just what the media said about him years ago.
Musk grabs a coffee-table book published by The Onion and starts leafing through it, laughing hysterically. “In order to understand the essential truth of things,” he theorizes, “I think you can find it in The Onion and occasionally on Reddit.” Afterward, he asks excitedly, “Have you ever seen Rick and Morty?” And the conversation bounces from that animated show to South Park to The Simpsons to the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
See? That quirky real-life Tony Stark or modern-day Howard Hughes who is spearheading space travel even watches Rick and Morty and browses Reddit. He’s just like you and me.
But either way, Elon Musk has absolutely made the media angry nowadays and if you search his name, he has replaced Donald Trump as an object of hate like I said. So as a result, there’s a huge pent-up demand (at least in the eyes of some) for a new Twitter clone. Okay, I disagree. See; there isn’t as much as there was for the Tumblr porn ban. But to explain this, I’m going to define offshoot sites into two categories: Containment Sites and Reactionary Sites.Two kinds of sites: Reactionary and Containment sites
So what exactly is a containment site and what is (what I am terming) a reactionary site? To explain this; I’ll use real world examples for each to define each site. These two categories are not strict, and many websites such as 8chan/8kun fit the characteristics of both sites.
A containment site is a website which serves to “contain” a userbase from a different website for some reason or another. These websites are defined by various characteristics, including:
The website either solely exists to or serves the purpose of hosting a userbase that has been banned from numerous major websites.
The motive for making the site is solely due to users or discussion topics being banned from another site.
A userbase that repels people from outside this community for some reason or another.
Does not appeal to you if you’re not part of the audience banned.
Has a higher chance of having an echo chamber effect, a lower chance of being seen outside of said group, etc.
Growth depends on users being banned or censored from a website.
There are many examples of containment sites online, or websites that started as such. FurAffinity and Inkbunny both started as one, while pretty much all of the companies that fall under the “alt-tech” sphere for some reason or another (including Gab, Voat (dead), 8chan/8kun/whatever its latest incarnation is now, BitChute, and even Odysee/LBRY, Rumble, GiveSendGo, and many more) are known for having such an audience even if they did not intend on it. These websites do in fact gain easy audiences but for one reason; these users cannot go back to Twitter or other big tech sites. Therefore, these users are stuck on one site. There are plenty of issues with the containment site model. For example, these websites can have many security lapses due to a combination of mismanagement and a lack of intelligent staff, and multiple alt-tech sites were hacked which led to direct retaliation against users there as a result. GiveSendGo donators were harassed or had banking issues, Parler and Gab were hacked with the former having information on unauthorized protesters being sent to the FBI, and other sites have had hosting/banking issues as a result of being targeted. This isn’t just a thing with right wing political sites; FurAffinity has been targeted with spam attacks and InkBunny has had to openly make clear in the rules they do not want pedophiles signing up. Much of these websites are also known for a very distinct community that repels anyone outside the group signing up for it, leading to an echo chamber effect at times.
Other times, the topic that causes users to start a containment site doesn’t need to be politically loaded. There were a lot of topics the big name Pokemon forums like BMGf and Serebii Forums (or SPPf) were banning discussion of; with two that come to mind being ROM hacking and save file modding. PokeCommunity Forums and the Project Pokemon Forums built up communities solely on discussing these taboo topics. In particular, Project Pokemon started up based on discussion around the classic Pokemon save file modification utility PokeSAV and other Pokemon series hacking information, while PokeCommunity became the main hub for Pokemon ROM hacks and whatnot.
But most importantly, for these sites to pop up there has to be nowhere else for them to go. When Tumblr died nobody stepped up to the plate to make a similar site until it was years too late to make a dent (and even with some of these sites such as Cohost, the moderation is nowhere near as lax as it was during the golden age of Tumblr). Pillowfort never quite took off as the website was running into security issues (and is still paywalled), while Cohost literally launched in 2022; far too late to make a dent or impact. I’m fairly sure all the big Pokemon forums banning discussion of Pokemon leaks also led discussion to shift over to big tech run social media platforms due to their lax moderation of the time.
This is essential, because the problem with using any alternative website is that you run the very real risk of having zero exposure on said site. This is especially true if your site is blacklisted from search engines.
Reactionary sites (as I am defining it) are notable for something else. These websites were not started for people banned from another website but were started as a reaction towards something happening to another site. Maybe management sold the site out or screwed over staff/the users, but these sites exist for one of two reasons. The first type of these sites caters to a group banned from another site (but the users really want that site back), so they launch a site that’s just like the site they’re addicted to posting on but with hookers and blow. With a few exceptions, these sites aren’t that active because there is nothing on there for those banned from a big site such as Twitter, but also nothing that they can’t see on Twitter either. Sometimes they even cater to users of that site just angry at a certain person running the site. These sites are only successful if the original website goes down for good, or does something that makes the userbase schism like with ResetEra breaking off of NeoGAF to the point neither site has remotely the same culture anymore. Some such sites also end up as containment sites; with many SomethingAwful and a few Kiwi Farms offshoot sites being this way.
Some examples of a forum going down for good include AssemblerGames schisming off into several sites online (including ObscureGamers, which also lost users after high-profile drama) or DPReview nearly going down until it found a new buyer (A few sites started out as bunkers before DPReview was confirmed to be stable). 8chan’s months long shutdown also led to a schism of imageboard culture as the replacements would infight hard, and lots of bunkers and offshoots were set up as a result. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of this and to be honest I don’t know too much about what went on there, but I did see some of the same trends.
Some of the characteristics of a site such as this include:
The motive of making the site is either “revenge” towards the staff, or because a site’s demise seems imminent.
Tries to be “just like an old site” but better.
Oftentimes mimics the rules, UI, and moderation of the old site.
Tries to have a wider mass appeal and replace the other site
Can double as a containment site, but with fewer users in many cases.
Reactionary sites tend to have a history of not doing so well, namely due to their tendency to have all the disadvantages of a containment site but without the carrot of being able to say funny racial slurs, discuss banned topics, or posting banned artwork. These sites only do well if the original website goes down, and they’re started just in time to tell people this new site is where to go. I also hope you have the moderation and servers in place to handle the new userbase, the skids who want to hack your site, etc.A tale of two sites: Weasyl and Inkbunny
The nice part about having a blog is that I can talk about furry drama without a 14 year old in a Tap-Out T-Shirt cutting me off in a Discord call and calling me a degenerate autist while I’m explaining crazy things I saw online. In this case; I’m going to be talking about two furry art sites: one a reactionary site and one a containment site. So let’s talk about the background here; FurAffinity as an art site is absolutely terrible. The rules suck and are constantly being tightened for no reason, the backend is garbage, the site is missing numerous features literally everyone else has implemented years ago, let alone features that would be useful for the creative furry scene such as having a character list or something. It still chugs along for two reasons: the back catalogue (which is shrinking with new rules rolled out), and the fact that “everyone else uses it”. Oh, and Tumblr/Twitter were more attractive to artists than an obscure furry art site is because it has people using it.
The first website I’m going to take a look at is Weasyl, a very much reactionary furry art site. Now Weasyl is an art site you might not have heard of and this is for a very good reason. These days it’s languishing in obscurity. The Github account for it still gets commits, but the blog hasn’t gotten a post since 2021 and the Twitter account since 2020. In fact, a post on the lead dev/admin’s page asked if the site was still active/in active development. I am sure someone still uses it as a main site instead of as a website loaded up into PostyBirb, but for most furries it’s not even on their radar (someone will disagree with me on this). Searching FurAffinity.net brings up far more results in my Telegram client than Weasyl.com does anyway.
It’s a shame because Weasyl is in many ways the anti-furaffinity. The code is FOSS and you can see it being updated still. The website supports numerous and I mean numerous features FurAffinity does not, including especially high-res image uploading. It probably has better moderation than FurAffinity does, considering an AI can do it better I’m sure. But what really made Weasyl get hyped up was what happened in the mid-2010s with the furry fandom. See; FurAffinity notoriously went into a week or so of downtime with read-only mode, and then on top of that furaffinity was just badly run. This peaked with an infamous hack in 2016 leading to passwords being leaked. For years, furries were totally going to leave FurAffinity forever. Guides were made, reddit talked about moving off complete with manifestos that stated their issues with the site, and multiple
migration tools were made. Does this all sound familiar?
So; what happened to Weasyl to the point where it became as irrelevant as Mitsubishi cars are today? Well, it’s simple really. Weasyl only got two kinds of users: people who hated FurAffinity going down, and people who hated Dragoneer (but weren’t breaking the cub rule, more on this later). It also gets artists uploading high resolution copies of their artwork, for people who don’t want to touch Inkbunny, and for artists who don’t paywall it behind Patreon. But most importantly, Tumblr hadn’t banned porn yet and Twitter was looking awfully attractive, and so many more artists moved to sites where the users were. Free from the shackles of the furry containment site sphere, they could spread their artwork far and wide.
But most importantly; Weasyl offered nothing that you can’t find on FurAffinity or big social media sites. FurAffinity has notoriously banned art of “cub” (essentially furry lolisho) characters, and Weasyl followed suit from day one it seems. There was no controversy because it was banned to begin with. Unfortunately, these rules are also notoriously vague and tend to be a matter of “does the admin like this”.
So what happens when an art site allows this art? Well, you’ll end up with the curious case of Inkbunny.net. See, Inkbunny is also a furry art gallery that’s also more advanced than FurAffinity is but with a difference; cub art is allowed without humans. In fact, FurAffinity banning such art is exactly why Inkbunny got so popular and has as many users as it does. There are users who will only post to Inkbunny as a result, but the problem is merely mentioning that kind of art is bound to provoke two kinds of people, a crowd that says drawings have rights and the other that really is obsessive about jacking it to cartoons. As a result, many artists are on only Inkbunny, and many refuse to touch the site because blacklisting the cub art isn’t enough, it must not exist on the same site as them. There’s also plenty of creepy users as a result of the cub thing, managing to top Japan’s horniest otakus who managed to turn into a meme.
To add to this, every time something like FurAffinity tightening rules on what art is allowed happens, Inkbunny gets hammered with new traffic because it’s seen as a place that will let you upload whatever with minimal moderation.
Essentially; the containment site model is a blessing and a curse. It ensures a website will always have new traffic and a new audience, but it also appeals mostly to those banned from a different website. A reactionary website can only work if the original site goes offline, as if you’re not banned from the original site you have no reason to use this offshoot site. This is why Inkbunny is still a known name in the furry sphere. Inkbunny caters to an audience banned from mainstream furry sites; at the expense of an audience who sees no reason to sign up and is likely actively repulsed by the users there.The fediverse and containment sites
So what about the fediverse and it’s role in all of this? Well, I like to see the fediverse as a containment site. The point I made about two fediverses also applies here. One segment of the fediverse is banned from Twitter, and one is signing up because Elon Musk is a meanie. There’s a lot of parallels to the furry art sites here with instances. To reframe my post about the two fediverses here; one side of the fediverse is here because they cannot go back to Twitter, and one side is here because they hate Elon Musk. On top of that, even the left wing side of the fediverse is fractured as a result of there being two kinds of users: “normies” who listen to NPR/Freespeech.org, and the diehard schizophrenic leftists who will harass you if you don’t use CWs or alt-text on your post. I mean, for those people maybe the fedi acts as a sort of containment site, for internet leftists so neurotic that all their half-hearted friends ghost them.
The more open side of the fediverse absolutely loves being a containment site for specific people, and aside from Alex Gleason (who has similar goals to that of Eugen with different stances on speech/trans issues/veganism) many of them wouldn’t have it any other way. One instance will have users asking you to say a racial slur when you sign up. Another instance has admins who will nuke your account if you don’t post your fetishes after signing up. These in a way serve to ward out normies and infiltrators to some degree, given many would not want to be caught dead saying racial slurs. They want to find people like them online, and they know it’s a source of quality user growth. They know someone joining because they’re banned from Twitter will stick around, because they cannot go back to Twitter.
Yet at the same time, it’s easy to see why the fediverse can repel normies. Many boomers who voted for Biden will struggle to understand why a bunch of online users are harassing them about “CWs” and “alt-text” or something and why doing anything makes people offended. On the other hand, boomers who voted for Trump don’t understand why every online right community is full of people who will happily tell you why everything you learned in school was a lie, or will chew you out for posting “pull yourselves up by the bootstraps” or “but how does this personally affect you”.
As of now, much of the fediverse is containment, be it from lolisho artists/fans or schizophrenic political “extremists”. But what about 5 years down the line?Threads and the Google Talk scare
This is where it gets interesting. See; lately Facebook has decided to integrate their walled garden Twitter clone known as Threads with ActivityPub.
One argument against Threads federating boils down to the classic “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” policy Microsoft used to practice, and compares it to Google Talk. Now Google as a company is very notorious for creating something, and then killing it just a few months later. It’s to the point where there’s a website called the “Google Graveyard” listing products Google killed off. One such product was Google Talk; which was an XMPP messaging service Google ran, competing with AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, and numerous less popular (in the USA) messengers such as ICQ, Xfire, and more. It didn’t exactly seem to be that popular given nobody I knew back then used it, and it was killed one day when Google replaced the multiple chat services they had with Hangouts (which in Google fashion was also killed off for yet another app called Google Chat and Google Meet or something, why can’t Google be consistent?).
But the canon as written by users online, regardless of how true it is or regardless of Google’s track record goes “once upon a time there was this chat client named XMPP, it was the best thing ever, and then Google ruined it” and this is backed up by a blogpost that claims this, along with a viral Mastodon post parroting this and saying that users will be forced into threads to federate. In fact, it pins the issues on XMPP solely on Google almost, and not the problems with the protocol, how it took a while to add features, how much of the world sees XMPP as jank thanks to Avaya/Cisco software at their IT wagecage, and more. But most importantly; this was similar to the issue of say, Mastodon.social having most of the users on the fedi:
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
While XMPP still exist and is a very active community, it never recovered from this blow. Too high expectation with Google adoption led to a huge disappointment and a silent fall into oblivion. XMPP became niche. So niche that when group chats became all the rage (Slack, Discord), the free software community reinvented it (Matrix) to compete while group chats were already possible with XMPP. (Disclaimer: I’ve never studied the Matrix protocol so I have no idea how it technically compares with XMPP. I simply believe that it solves the same problem and compete in the same space as XMPP).
Now when you look at the “instance question”, instance blocking, and how many of these instances just so happen to go down because the admin quit, it’s easy to see why everyone would trust Google for XMPP instead. If you had to ask your coworker if he would trust an internet tough guy or the powertripping manager being in control of his online life or Google, he’d trust Google because he has “nothing to hide”. The post then compares Facebook joining the fediverse to a company with no focus and Microsoft. But the cherry on top is this part:
I know we all dream of having all our friends and family on the Fediverse so we can avoid proprietary networks completely. But the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.
By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. They are the master of that game. They are trying to bring everyone in their field, to make people compete against them using the weapons they are selling.
Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.
Right; that’s cool. Let’s see what his instance is blocking:
Well we do have a few instances blocked, but I’m sure if more people talked to his instance or his instance was in the anglosphere they’d be blocked, given it’s a smallish instance with only 2.9k users. Let’s see how the instance bugged by Meta to federate fares:
And what about the one with the guy making the viral thread and linking that post saying fedi should be free speech:
Are you noticing something? These instances only approve of the freespeech.org kind of free speech, the free speech that’s as free as the local radio station owned by Clear Channel playing only approved music is edgy and anti-establishment.
I’m very curious to watch this unfold, given the rumors that Facebook is also being selective about who they federate with (I’m sure they don’t want people posting many kinds of memes), and how internet leftists act online. What I do know is Eugen is onboard with it.
But what does this all have to do with what I said earlier? Right. So basically; there’s now big tech companies dipping their toes in this new defederated thing. I suspect there will be people flocking to these because just like mastodon.social, being on there means you’re far less likely to be blocked if you are a system enjoyer. After all, right now it’s really trendy to talk about how the “hate speech and disinformation” on Twitter, but telling someone the fediverse has none of that is like pranking someone by telling them that the part of town you know is sketchy is a beautiful neighborhood you can walk at night or leave your door unlocked in.
But with how big tech companies and the like think Mastodon is the future, who knows how it’ll be in a few years when it’s no longer cool, and associated with the chuds and lolisho posters. It sounds crazy, but look what happened to crypto. One day it was the cool thing that was going to change the world…the next thing you know the SPLC is trying to track everyone on their shitlist who uses it:
Maybe that will be the fedi in 5 years if shitty startups and big tech can’t exactly grasp it; something extremely tainted that nobody who isn’t in the in group will want to touch, maybe it’ll be normal for instances to have to run with no frontends or with APIs locked down to avoid censorship, who knows. After all; this is part and parcel with running a containment site. Right next to names of someone who could be considered remotely far-right like Kevin MacDonald and Richard Spencer, are names of libertarians and sites run by such including Luke Smith, Kiwi Farms, Cody Wilson, altcensored.com (a website that in their own words is nonpolitical and just logs videos YouTube hides/censors), and even boomer conservatives like Laura Loomer.
I guess my point here is, the last remnants of the internet are on containment sites, websites made in reaction to other sites fail because they offer nothing if you are not banned from Twitter, and I hope if you’re for free speech you’re willing to see your picture and real name next to that of Alex Jones, Andrew Anglin, and Kiwi Farms because that’s what you’ll have to put up with (and many people online just aren’t).Musk always wins
So how am I going to end this schizopost? By saying that no matter what you do, Elon Musk always wins and so do walled gardens. Everyone on the fediverse is constantly infighting and trying to do every song and dance to avoid being blocked; thanks to the consensus filter. You don’t want to be a bigot, do you?
Case in point; a friend’s artist girlfriend is on the fedi and BlueSky. He cannot follow her on fedi or share his art because of signed fetches and being on mastodon.art’s blocklist (she uses Mastodon.art). But on BlueSky, the monolithic platform, he can follow and reshare her art. Sure, you’ll get jannied from Bluesky if you post lolisho or get report bombed or similar. But since you’re blocked from another site for something that the website owner decided (with no way to negotiate it), this situation will keep playing itself out more and more until you go to a monolithic website where you don’t have to worry about instance blocks, only if you’re banned or not.
Basically, Elon Musk always wins if you don’t say funny words online that start with an N. No matter where you go, you’ll find out you can’t repost the guy you liked because he used this instance that blocks stuff (and he won’t move instances), and you’ll be back. He will too when he asks why nobody interacts with his posts.
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/12/18/the-logic-of-offshoot-sites-a-pure-schizopost/