Posts by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
 (DIR) Post #AbdPhLBawT7i2QRQVE by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2022-09-30T19:27:24Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       So I have work later today, but the tl;dr is I’m going to make a Pleroma instance/server run on a Sun Ultra 45, and if that fails I’m going to make it run on any other non-x86 old computer I have lying around in my basement. https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2022/09/30/quick-summary/
       
 (DIR) Post #AbdQjFoZz0STuf9VKa by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2023-10-23T19:37:21Z
       
       5 likes, 8 repeats
       
       A few months ago, I was passed an invite code to Bluesky by @Moon (thanks a lot!). I’ve been lurking the site once every few days but as I’ve lost interest in doing even that, I think it’s a good time to write what my feelings on it are.Essentially Bluesky is a very unique kind of containment site; a site made for those who were angry at a different website instead of banned from a different website. Historically these websites have done poorly, and many friends I still have in the furry fandom have abandoned their account after they realized others are not using it often and interaction ratios are mediocre. The community is truly something else however. Essentially; it’s extremely sterile but it’s also interesting to see why people are using it. But I’ll just sum it up in the beginning so you don’t need to read my ramblings; Bluesky is like large Mastodon instances without instance blocking (yet) and enough people to dilute some of the worst people who only post to ask you to “CW and alt text everything.”A different kind of containmentBluesky is a different kind of containment site from containment sites in the past. Previously containment sites were founded for a number of reasons. One well known site that falls into this mold is FurAffinity, which was founded after a popular furry art gallery banned adult art in 2005, and another banned furries in 2006. When FurAffinity would ban “cub” characters (in theory furry lolisho which is already one of the most loaded topics online but in reality, whatever the admins declared as such), the users who drew said art would move on over to Inkbunny. In the past decade, containment sites (or “bunker sites” as imageboard users called them in case of an imageboard shutdown or outage) have popped up more and more in result to unapproved political content being heavily banned or censored from the mainstream social media sites.Over the past decade this would happen more and more, with sites like Gab, Voat, Bitchute, and many more popping up and suffering hosting issues for incidents that Facebook or Google would pay PR firms to make go away. While 8chan took much of the brunt when some guy shot a mosque up in New Zealand, the livestream of the event was posted to Facebook, which had carefully crafted PR agents ready to make the problem go away as they called for more internet censorship.Of course, even a large social media site can act as a containment site, as Tumblr essentially did before the porn ban destroyed the userbase and value of the site so severely that Automattic now owns it (and sees it as a side project to the flagship product of WordPress). It’s well known that the Tumblr porn ban sent users who were still on Tumblr flocking over to Twitter, and making the mob rule of Twitter that was seeping in so much worse that seemingly overnight it changed the culture of Twitter into something even worse.But Bluesky and its ilk are a new breed of containment site. In the past, containment sites were designed for people who wanted to post controversial pornography or non-approved political opinions, and quite frankly they didn’t have much appeal for anyone else. There was no reason to use them if you were not banned from social media websites, and even if you were these sites would nearly always devolve into an echo chamber. Only now with so many people being banned on social media or censored for anything and everything, is this finally changing.Bluesky and similar containment sites like Mastodon.social are not like these other containment sites. Bluesky is something else entirely; it’s not a containment site for someone banned for posting too many FBI crime statistics, but rather a site for someone traumatized by seeing too many uncomfortable statistics and memes. Fueling this is Elon Musk buying Twitter and the object of hate for Twitter users switching from Donald Trump to Elon Musk. Bluesky wants to be the idealized version of early 2010s Twitter, which can no longer happen as the people no longer exist.BlueSky and it’s weird federationIf Mastodon was piggybacking off the StatusNet network in 2016 to gain access to an established network while flooding it with new users with a different mindset, the devs behind Bluesky are a lot more clever. They knew what Eugen and the Mastodon team have wanted to do with a focus on more censorship than Twitter had to bubblewrap users more, and as a result they are baking moderation into the currently in development protocol. Let’s take a look at this.As of 2023, Bluesky claims it’s a federated social network as of now but the truth is, right now Bluesky is nowhere near federated. It’s a monolithic social network that currently does not federate with anything. The federation is still in testing and it’s planned for a 2024 release (years after ActivityPub has done the same thing and over a decade since StatusNet). But the planned method of federation for Bluesky is nothing like ActivityPub. If AP is designed to function just like e-mail, ATProto is designed to function just like Napster did in a way. According to a diagram posted on the Bluesky website, personal servers are not intended to talk directly to each other but rather to a “big graph service” server first. Anyone who knows social media services and censorship knows why this could be a problem. In fact, one fedi developer said “nobody would find this to be an issue if they drew an arrow between the PDS servers”. There’s no Github documentation to host your own server as of now either, you’re on your own.The big idea for reinventing the wheel is to obviously avoid the “losing your posting career when your instance goes down” problem. This can be controversial for someone who cares about privacy due to using universal identities, but the younger generation loves to share usernames and feel like a celebrity posting online. Everything is a show (until it isn’t anymore).But let’s not kid ourselves, the main reason that they’re reinventing the wheel at BlueSky is to allow for stricter moderation functionality and all one has to do is Google to find this out. In fact, one of the motives for Bluesky being invite-only is to enhance the moderation tools:Moderation is a necessary feature of social spaces. It’s how bad behavior gets constrained, norms get set, and disputes get resolved. We’ve kept the Bluesky app invite-only and are finishing moderation before the last pieces of open federation because we wanted to prioritize user safety from the start.There’s a good reason Bluesky is doing this: Bluesky wants to experiment with some of the most oppressive moderation systems online, to give the same people who destroyed the rest of the internet a chance to cry out as they shit on your floormat. Take a look at some of the proposals they had for moderation. One such proposal is reply-gating, which is designed to only let certain people reply to you. On Twitter this is one of the most abused features and along with “hiding replies” is a sign that the poster is trying to hide something from you.Or how about the ability to delete replies?You know, some things never change. Back in the mid-2010s days of Twitter culture war flamewars, “muh mentions” was a very common way to escape arguments to the point one e-celeb even even made a joke about it.Another proposal advocates for “content labeling”, which as Twitter community notes has shown, won’t exactly go in the direction the owners of the site want it to. There’s not a lot I can say otherwise about this though.Not all of these proposals and ideas go over well with users, and one thing BlueSky users have absolutely hated is how blocks are all public. Furthermore, the post even mentions that “rogue apps” can not enforce this blocking behavior, which knowing Pleroma and it’s userbase means that it will happen and that it’s just privacy through obscurity.In theory, a bad actor could create their own rogue client or interface which ignores some of the blocking behaviors, since the content is posted to a public network. But showing content or notifications to the person who created the block won’t be possible, as that behavior is controlled by their own PDS and client. It’s technically possible for a rogue client to create replies and mentions, but they would be invisible or at least low-impact to the recipient account for the same reasons. Protocol-compliant software in the ecosystem will keep such content invisible to other accounts on the network. If a significant fraction of accounts elected to use noncompliant rogue infrastructure, we would consider that a failure of the entire ecosystem.Given that one of the main fediverse instance software stacks even includes a feature to reject deletes from servers, this is already a failure. If the people that the AtProto types want to keep away end up using it and not sticking to AP, you just know that this is going to be common. The same goes with ActivityPub scopes being easily MRF’d as well, and some servers will MRF scopes from unlisted to public. In fact with ActivityPub, there’s no longer just one instance software running the show. There are at least 4 main ones (Mastodon, Lemmy, Misskey, Pleroma), and many forks of these (Glitch-soc, hometown, fedibird, Akkoma, Soapbox/Rebased, Firefish (formerly Calckey), and many many more) on top of some smaller players as well (GoToSocial, Pixelfed, WriteFreely, Friendica, the 4 people still using GNU Social, etc.) But I’m getting ahead of myself here, all this is pointless because…Federation doesn’t even need to workBluesky isn’t getting new signups because it’s federated, and the userbase doesn’t care if it is federated either. Rather; Bluesky is popular because of the containment site aspect and the elitism aspect. While Bluesky might have used invites to finetune moderation and curate a community, it’s also given Bluesky an elitist aspect to it. Having a Bluesky account earlier on was a status symbol in the same way having a SomethingAwful or ResetEra account was, people were paying money to get in. A few months later, the hype has fizzled, seemingly every furry has an account, and I’ve struggled to give away invite codes. Even some users I gave them out to haven’t even set profile pictures, that’s how little they could care about it.The people in on it are similar to those on Mastodon.social, the biggest users are no different than an NPR listener regurgitating left wing talking points. Just by browsing Mastodon.social’s trending page you can see posts about Trump, “election deniers”, complaining about Elon Musk, climate change, George Takei taking a shit, even posts about how masks still work. Bluesky still has some of them mixed with dumb Reddit/Tumblr “safe humor”, George Takei still taking a shit, and signs there’s cracks in paradise. The main difference however is that Bluesky has lots of furries on it, posting overtly sexual content since that’s what furries are notorious for doing.In a way, BlueSky or some of the big Mastodon instances could be compared to the country of Singapore as described in William Gibson’s famous article, a country where any sort of unique counterculture has been squashed in favor of a country as artificial as a shopping mall or Disneyland was, while the fediverse could be described as how Kowloon was. The artificial feeling of the site isn’t lost on others, with one person on fedi who got an invite as well comparing it to the artificial nature of retirement communities that allow. Of course, just like how the golden days of the 60s won’t come back no matter how many times you listen to the Beach Boys Greatest Hits album on repeat, the 2010s won’t come back when you’re browsing Bluesky with Lapfox on in the background cranked up on your Wal-Mart Skullcandy headphones.Yet, the community of the fediverse is a turnoff for the typical left wing Twitter account poster, let alone someone who just likes to make jokes online. Many Mastodon instances are notorious for their extremely strict culture that is sterilized just like 90s Singapore was, complete with new instance blocklists that look very polished popping up all the damn time. But perhaps most tellingly, this Reddit thread asking for all the fun people online sums it up. A user asks if there is an instance which doesn’t require you to CW literally everything, and he is berated by screeching harpies who tell him that you’ll totally be defederated for doing so. But the user telling him that not tagging CWs literally leads to Nazis is also the mindset of many bad Mastodon admins and the Bluesky community.The other side of the fediverse is more like the Kowloon walled city in a way. With light censorship and light rules on things, anyone can spin up an instance and post whatever, not caring if Mastodon.social and some schizophrenic instances block them because unlike Twitter they can say whatever. Naturally, this is also a hard sell for many who want that gated community feel online, as seeing slurs and humor again can cause some people to blow a fuse.Which leads to why Bluesky is popular with some, even if that furry artist you follow posts 5 times as much on Twitter. Bluesky right now does not have that issue of instance blocking wars, or crazy strict moderators, because it has that image of being run by a professional company. As long as you don’t start telling egirls to get a real job or similar, you won’t get banned, because if you do just like in Singapore you’ll be banned real fast. But just like how there’s lots of people who like using big sterile Discord servers either out of necessity or because they actually like them, there’s plenty of people who want to sit on a sanitized social network.Even worse, there’s a login wall to view Bluesky posts. This is creating an illusion of privacy through obscurity, until someone either creates a post browser or gets an account and starts browsing posts of people they want to screencap. The funny part is, this has led to some of the fattest nude selfies I have unfortunately had to see with my own two eyes. There’s also many features missing with Bluesky from DMs to gifs/video support to pinned posts to even hashtags, but the diehards using it don’t care about all that.They care about the fact that right now there is no “instance question”, no block wars, and they can feel at home in their sanitized posting website. In a year, it’ll be interesting if anyone talks about it still knowing where it’s going and how long it took the fedi to get to where it is now. Others on the fedi might appreciate how it’s acting as containment to keep the same people who killed the mainstream internet off their turf, so who knows.There’s more I could probably think of saying, but quite frankly I could care less about Bluesky. It seems like a mess federation wise, and the community on it isn’t giving me confidence.A quick editThere’s a few more things I was suggested to touch upon and mention as well. First of all, someone else on the fedi brought up Nostr which is even more decentralized. The issue is, I simply haven’t seen Nostr take off as much as the fediverse has (though a few people I know on fedi have accounts on both). I have not looked too deeply into it and I haven’t had terribly much interest in looking into it as well mostly as I simply haven’t had people I know on it who don’t use something else. Still, I think it’ll be interesting to see where that goes in a year too.The second thing I just remembered is that Mastodon.social has two things in it’s favor; users who solely post a single topic and “stability”. This attracts normies to it, but unfortunately while Mastodon.social doesn’t have the largest blocklist it has a hefty blocklist. As a result, instance blocking ends up becoming used as a weapon to get people to fall in line by both Mastodon.social and by many other instances blindly pasting in blocklists.The thing with Bluesky is that while there are blocklists, they’re not server blocklists but rather user blocklists that lots of people willingly import (and they’re designed to be easy to import, as a baked in feature). Hence, if you’re on blocklists due to guilt by association you’ll end up with the awkward scenario of not getting many interactions while users who have blocked you are currently spreading rumors about you. Fun, isn’t it?Hence, with Bluesky I tend to get the feeling that something is fake about it and that everything is a facade, given I’ve been there before. I’m sure many people who have lived through the same things I have with online communities rotting to the core can agree.https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/10/23/bluesky-the-new-containment-site/
       
 (DIR) Post #Abi545gLcoMpMndFzc by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2023-11-11T21:47:39Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       It’s widely accepted among those who have posted online that perhaps one of the worst singular events to happen to the internet was the Tumblr porn ban, carried out by it’s third owner Verizon (who had inherited the site from Yahoo, a part of a failed ad network strategy). Verizon had made many terrible decisions when purchasing Yahoo and AOL for their add networks, including purging many legacy but well-liked services that were essentially information archives (in particular under the Yahoo banner such as Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Groups), and selling off Flickr to new owners who gimped the site unless you paid up for Pro™. But perhaps the most short-sighted decision Verizon made was to handle Apple finding CSAM (or Cheese Pizza as it’s nicknamed) on Tumblr by banning porn completely.This one decision would have ramifications and in a way, would be one of the biggest community killing choices made by any internet company (if not the largest). This would send Tumblr’s userbase scrambling to different websites, be it Twitter or even parts of 4chan. This would lead to community members flooding other social media sites and imposing their cultural norms and behaviors there, and altering the fabric of internet communities to a point of no return. What do I mean by this? Well, every single behavior from Tumblr (from “fixing” art by editing it to make it more “diverse”, to harassing artists drawing something the wrong way or something that some users don’t approve of is now everywhere on Twitter. It’s just even worse now because unlike Tumblr, Twitter has far stricter moderation. Tumblr was the kind of website where on top of reading about casual drug use openly or users openly committing crimes like shoplifting, there’d be some characters. No other website could turn out girls like Lindsay Souvannarath, who after being busted in a failed mall shooting plot was discovered to be a “Neo Nazi Columbine fangirl” among other things. Yes, that’s a mouthful to take in but when I say that Tumblr at one time allowed anything and everything, I mean that.Verizon didn’t handle CSAM in the way that most sites would by cracking down on it and only that, and maybe other unsavory content, or by using the app being off the store as pressure to get people to move to freer mobile platforms, but by literally banning everything with an infamously half-assed filter. I’m sure some boomer in a suit only realized “oh shit we own a website for porn, shut it down” and that’s what happened. Tumblr would lose tons of value and would be bought at a steep discount by Automattic, the owners of WordPress (the project and .com, where this blog is hosted). WordPress has followed in the footsteps of Verizon by also refusing to unban porn, with the CEO sounding a lot like Joshua Connor Moon in an essay he wrote. While the post mainly targets mid egirls or >egirls who are dime a dozen online, it fails to address drawn art (which was a huge deal on Tumblr). Even allowing drawn art would be better for the internet than posting IRL images, especially in the wake of the PornHub revenge porn and CSAM scandals.His refusal to do the one thing to fix Tumblr has paid off, and now Tumblr is downscaling with employees being moved elsewhere after continuing to burn through money. Everyone in the comment section pretty much has the same opinion, mocking the fact that Tumblr won’t do the one thing to get people back on.There’s no popular prepackaged solutionYet despite Tumblr going down the tubes, one interesting thing is that there has been no new Tumblr clone as of late that has gained traction, and especially not a decentralized one. There’s pillowfort.social, but that website has had issues with being insecure and paywalled so nobody cares about it. There’s cohost which is actually free and does a great job mimicking Tumblr, but it has very strict moderation/rules, and the community is the monoculture everyone stereotyped Tumblr as being. But most importantly, despite how anti-corporate the creators claim to be the creators won’t license their code under something like the AGPL. If the owners ever decide they want to leave the internet or carry out an unpopular ban wave, you’re back to square one. In fact, the cohost ToS as an example prohibits archival and promoting bunker sites if the admins ever backstab their users (which Twitter has been caught doing multiple times with BSky and Fedi users).It’s also interesting how after DeviantArt has gone down the tubes after the Wix buyout with an infamous new UI designed to mimic ArtStation and also cracking down on the content people used to visit the site for; there’s also no new federated or open source art gallery solution yet. Meanwhile, Redditors (which are probably the worst community online bar none) are able to develop their own federated Reddit clone called Lemmy, and after the API fiasco this led many to run their own instances of it. Yet as of now, there’s no real fediverse Tumblr clone, just people posting on Mastodon wishing it was Tumblr.While I was going to end this on a negative note, I did find out that there is in fact at least one person trying to write a federated Tumblr clone, and also was told that “SocialHome exists but it looks awful“. There’s also Misskey/Firefish implementing inline replies as well, but it’s not a Tumblr clone but rather a Twitter clone. Neither SocialHome or Swanye (the new project) are popular at all, and Swanye is in pre-alpha state or something like that.I guess my point with this post is, if you just whine online all day long nothing will happen. If you make your own federated software stack, the idea won’t die. Just ask the Redditors. Whining about how your favorite website is offline when it’s clear it won’t come back won’t make it come back any faster.https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/11/11/the-end-of-tumblr-or-i-guess-youll-have-to-pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-after-all/
       
 (DIR) Post #Ac5QtKtgdcGKdLgLAW by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2023-11-23T04:14:20Z
       
       16 likes, 12 repeats
       
       While I was sharing the classic “why Mastodon is big in Japan” article around to prove a point again about the early days of the fediverse and who actually uses the fediverse as opposed to who says they want to use the fediverse, I noticed yet again something I had never written about the fediverse in depth before. Namely; there are two major camps on the fediverse that are mutually incompatible and have widely different mindsets, giving the effect that there are two fediverses on the same network. Most of my posts on the fediverse and fediverse meta talk about this, but as I haven’t written a post solely on this (for linking purposes) I might as well do so for the future.One of the largest complaints about “the fediverse” right now comes down to the fact that the network is visibly fragmented. Instance blocking has become one of the most abused features of software stacks (or instance software as it’s called) on the fediverse. Instances will defederate each other or individual users for the stupidest of reasons, instance owners will lock down APIs so you can’t even see who is blocking who, and of course trying to negotiate with them is near impossible.The walled garden vs the federationThe first thing to understand why this is the case comes down to the design philosophies of social networks. The previous generations of social networks are commonly called “walled gardens” due to both the monolithic design of these websites and how they are designed to be the one place to go online. This is in reference to the architecture of AOL (and CompuServe, Prodigy, etc.) with a closed system of message boards, file hosting, and more all for users who paid for it. Just like today, these walled gardens had the same moderation scandals too, with at least one hacker creating a skid tool to protest AOL banning his account for asking why the child abusers aren’t banned.While these died off for a time period, they came back with a vengeance when internet companies consolidated and users began to use a site like Facebook to do everything. Even as Facebook’s popularity declines, it’s still notable for both being where boomers talk and Facebook Marketplace basically replacing Craigslist in the eyes of some normies. In China the situation is even more extreme, with WeChat being notorious for not only being used for chatting but also social media and payments. Elon Musk has seen this as his end game for Twitter as well, renaming the app to X in order to also eventually provide payments to become the “WeChat of the west“. Of course, this is highly unlikely given that Elon Musk manages to piss off powerful lobbies every other week seemingly, but I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook would be happy to take his place as an “everything app” developer.But one of the things these walled gardens are famous for is having moderation policies that get stronger and more toleration every month, chasing the dragon of having a website with “no bad people”. As a result, a lot of people now want a heavily moderated website and cannot exist outside a bubble in which strong moderation tools are present. This is important to remember, and it’ll explain why the fedi has the users it does.The federation architecture on the other hand used by ActivityPub and others has been compared to email for a good reason, email functions as such a network as well. You can send emails to anyone, and receive them. This is all in theory of course, as due to spam you can find yourself in the situation of having to be unlisted by the Google cartel. Many just give up and end up having to use Gmail or Outlook/Exchange anyway. But in an ideal world, you can send and receive emails to anyone, and this is supposed to be the idea of the fediverse too.The sides of the fediThe problem is that in the current year everything has to be split down the middle. The reality is, there are two different fediverses using the same protocol. In theory they can communicate with each other, but one side does not want the other to communicate (and sometimes both sides, depending on where you post).You might assume these sides are split politically and you’d be half right, one side is essentially a left-wing spectrum ranging from “catlady with MoveOn.org, =, and Bernie stickers all over her Chevy Spark permanently tuned to NPR” to “crazy former Tumblr user” and everyone in between, with the other being everyone else. There’s also tons and tons of infighting in these sides. An instance that has been blocked by everyone online for “loli” will also block some instances that might be “chuds”, a trans instance blocked by everyone will block the only people who want to talk to them for being *phobic and then cry about no activity, and instances blocking each other in the left wing side for arguments are great examples.But the truth is one side is about freedom of speech, one side is about building a larger and finer tuned hugbox, and you tend to end up on either side naturally depending on who you talk to. It’s not like you have a choice. One day you will notice posts quit showing up from someone you follow, you’re completely unfollowed from someone, and when you click follow you get “request sent”. None of their new posts will show up, and if they move instances they have a chance of being blocked. Hell, even if they self-host they might be blocked by some schizophrenic instance owner for “No TOS” or some stupid rule like that.Welcome to the world of having two networks speaking the same language, with the barrier put up existing only thanks to mass hysteria.And just like the culture war, it doesn’t matter where you go. You can run, you can hide, but you will always find yourself having to deal with the reality of this.The Mastodon Network™ sideOne side of the fediverse I’m going to call the Mastodon Network side. Now this name is actually somewhat misleading, a lot of the instances on this side do not run Mastodon (or its forks such as glitch-soc, hometown, etc.) but rather forks of Misskey (Firefish), Pleroma (Akkoma), and some software stacks written by adherents of their ideology such as GoToSocial. There are other nicknames you could give this side such as the “Rainbow Curtain”, fediblockers, the “signed fetch cartel” (I’ll explain what these are), and more.But the reason I’m calling it this is simple, this is the side that the new users, journalists, and promoters who call the entire network “Mastodon” or “The Mastodon Network” use. It’s heavily marketed with slick PR campaigns on multiple fronts, websites like joinfediverse.wiki or joinmastodon.org will try to steer you to instances with the same rules they enforce, and a Vice article called it “Twitter without the Nazis“. These people also tend to federate with Mastodon.social (think the Facebook or AOL of fediverse), and are on relatively few blocklists.The idea of the Mastodon Network is simple. The Mastodon Network is designed to be a social network like Twitter, except with more moderation and less harassment. As a result, this is reflected in posts from the users and words of the developers/promoters, github bugs/pull requests, and feature requests. To quote the big in Japan post (which is a look into that mindset some):The point of decentralized publishing is not censorship resistance – decentralization provides a little resilience to intermediary censorship, but not a lot. Instead, decentralization is important because it allows a community to run under its own rules. One of the challenges for Mastodon is to demonstrate that there are reasons beyond lolicon to run a community under your own rules. This is analogous to a problem Tor faces. People undeniably use Tor to do terrible things online, publishing and accessing hateful content. But Tor is an essential tool for journalists, whistleblowers and activists. It’s a constant struggle for Tor to recruit “everyday” users of Tor, who use the service to evade commercial surveillance. Those users provide valuable “cover traffic”, making it harder to identify whistleblowers who use the service, and political air cover for those who would seek to ban the tool so they can combat child pornography and other illegal content.Fortunately, there are communities that would greatly benefit from Mastodon: people who’ve grown sick of sexism and harassment on Twitter, but still want the brief, lightweight interaction the site is so good at providing. One of the mysteries of Mastodon is that while many instances were started precisely to provide these alternative spaces, they’ve not grown nearly as fast as those providing space for a subculture banned from Twitter. The Mastodon story so far suggests that sticks may be more powerful than carrots.Beyond porn, the internet has always provided spaces for content that wasn’t widely acceptable. When it was difficult to find information and LGBTQ lifestyles in rural communities, the internet became a lifeline for queer teens. Distributed social networks are a likely space for conversations about ideas and topics too sensitive to be accepted on centralized social networks, and it’s likely that some of the topics explored will be ones that become more socially acceptable over time.Oh gee, I wonder why it’s a mystery. It’s not rocket science to anyone who understands the internet though. The thing with the Mastodon Network is, it’s not only trying to be a network for people who aren’t banned from Twitter but it’s even targeting people who are angry that Twitter isn’t banning people fast enough. This is very important to remember every time Mastodon users come up. They want a mythical utopia, where no bad people ever exist, where you can never have to ever see a racial slur online ever again or get told your art sucks. The problem is not only are they not banned from Twitter, but they can only exist in an ecosystem of heavy moderation. Just like how supercars or XXL luxury SUVs tend to vanish from the market when the economy goes down the tubes, trans teens tend to not be found in places with less western influence. Which is the paradox with Mastodon, it’s trying to target people who can only exist in a massive moderation framework.While they can’t get everyone to comply, they will use their PR platforms to herd the cattle in. joinfediverse.wiki only lists servers that follow a Mastodon written ruleset, isn’t on a blocklist that’s now deleted from the site, and have “strict rules against hate”. A codeberg page tells people to use blocklists and that they must have one in place, but also says that “you should totally know how to moderate first“. One blocklist linked by the page is chosen by “literally this instance blocked it therefore instance bad”. Now imagine that tons of instance owners blindly pull these lists in and you can see why we have a problem. This has led to drama over blocklists as users complain their instance is on there, as posts from users quit showing up or the guy they want to follow stays at “Request Sent” forever.The other problem with blocklists is that they also serve as a weapon to get admins to do whatever they want. Whoever has the blocklist or control of the largest instances has the most power, any instance they block is now invisible to 500k-1m people all with the click of a mouse.But they don’t stop at blocklists. Case in point, when Gab joined the fediverse and caused massive hysteria (before defederating after their mentality expired), one notorious person wanted Mastodon to literally hardcode a domain block into the code itself.Another example of the Mastodon Network developer mindset as of late comes down to the “signed fetch” issue (or “Authorized Fetch” in the Mastodon world). Essentially, it’s a duct tape “fix” for the problem of federation working a little too well for gangstalking victims which means it has to be broken. To quote @mint:It adds a header with a signature of internal fetch account to requests coming from your instance so that other instance can check if it’s actually coming from it and not from someone curling the object, and also if your instance is already blocked to deny you from even seeing their posts.The Mastodon documentation also says it in tech terms, but also straight up explains what the purpose is: control.As a result, through the authentication mechanism and avoiding re-distribution mechanisms that do not have your server in the loop, it becomes possible to enforce who can and cannot retrieve even public content from your server, e.g. servers whose domains you have blocked.The end result of signed fetches is utter breakage in reading a thread. It’s very common to see posts where you can only see part of a conversation, with the original post missing, and no notification that the post is unable to be viewed. Why? Because of security theater, that’s what. Aside from being able to see the original post by clicking on “view external post” on the guy replying, there’s also a lot of tricks to bypass this. Even the people pushing for this admit it’s all security theater, and that it can be easily bypassed.But it’s remarkably effective security theater. GoToSocial, Firefish, Akkoma, and likely some smaller projects all have this on by default or have so many instances using it that many assume they do. In fact, GTS even requires signed fetches causing this Lemmy bug to be open and forcing Lemmy to implement it. Mastodon has it off by default (most of the worst offenders turn it on anyway), with the manuals warning of breakage:Unfortunately, secure mode is not without its drawbacks, which is why it is not enabled by default. Not all software in the fediverse can support it fully, in particular some functionality will be broken with Mastodon servers older than 3.0; you lose some useful functionality even with up-to-date servers since linked-data signatures are used to make public conversation threads more complete; and because an authentication mechanism on public content means no caching is possible, it comes with an increased computational cost.And that it’s also theater:Secure mode does not hide HTML representations of public posts and profiles. HTML is a more lossy format compared to first-class ActivityPub representations or the REST API but it is still a potential vector for scraping content.But see; here’s the fun part. This is exactly how this cabal gets what they want. Something trying to federate with Akkoma (or “Ackoma” as it’s nicknamed in some freer circles) that has it on by default or GoToSocial (which forces it IIRC) that doesn’t support signed fetches will have users filing bug reports (as shown with the GTS and Lemmy bug report) with “dood it doesn’t federate”. If you hold the line and refuse to implement it or simply don’t get around to it because your friends Mastodon instance doesn’t, well you know the rest:I could go on all day about the “features” or lack of them that have imply Mastodon and that side of the fediverse love security theater. I’m talking post scopes (including hilariously insecure DMs), search deliberately being broken in Mastodon for ages until opt in search was added (leading to this wild meltdown), quote posts not being in Mastodon because of “harassment”, hiding the block lists of servers, it goes on and on.But the point here is Mastodon users don’t want a federated network as much as they want a federation of allies, and a website that is like “Twitter but stricter rules“. Which is why the experience on these instances comes down to walking on eggshells, finding your entire instance blocked because of something someone else did, and gradually beginning to despise them when you can’t follow artists. But here’s the fun part; there’s a second fediverse.The “dark fedi”/”alt-fedi”/ex-GNU Social/Pleroma side etc.The other fediverse consists of literally everyone blocked by these federations of allies, many of which don’t like each other. Quite frankly, this group could be called “everyone else”. Everyone from Neo-Nazi boomers to lolicon enjoyers to schizophrenic trans communists who end up blocked by the main groups of them ends up in this circle. The last group is the most interesting because you’ll see posts from at least one instance crying about being blocked by other trans instances and being labeled as racists online every single day, but also wanting to be deep in the trans community. No, blocking poa.st and writing an essay about how they’re trying to kill you for being trans won’t get you unblocked. There’s also stuff like misskey.io being hard to follow and allegedly blocking people, or something. There are even a few instances on this side of the fediverse like freeatlantis, noagendasocial, and gameliberty that are in fact using Mastodon. There’s also instances on the fringes of this part of the web like Xenofem.me or Disqordia, where no matter how hard they try they will never be a real Mastodon Network instance. They’re only in this side of the fedi not for sharing anything in common, but for being too different to socialize with the other internet commissars, but every bit as bloodthirsty.Transgender schizophrenics aside, I’m going to focus on the largest overall segment of this (by instances in the Anglosphere), which is a desire for “free speech” or at least “free speech for me” (freespeech.org style, see poa.st as an example). A lot of the time they don’t even say those words, they basically say “yeah do whatever just don’t post illegal shit” or advertise their instance for shitposting. It’s a different part of the fediverse entirely because the community and vibe are massively different. If Mastodon is like walking on eggshells, the “dark fedi” is known for a thunderdome of shitposting, schizophrenic essays, and hodgepodge of many from different backgrounds given a computer and the ability to talk to each other. In some ways it’s pure chaos, but more of an old internet style chaos as opposed to the tightly controlled Mastodon Network instances that advocate for more censorship.This side of the fedi is like 4chan, an old message board with a group of friends, or a Modern Warfare 2 lobby from 2009 if it were social network. If on the Mastodon Network users end up blocking each other and crying online, posting on the other side is about forcing the person arguing with you to block you. It’s not a place for e-celebs or those who can only exist in the framework of Twitter moderation tools, but rather those escaping the Twitter moderation tools. It’s basically Twitter for those banned from Twitter, and that’s why it thrives. As a result, it’s likely to have a community that sticks around.The problem? That fedi artist you wanted to follow is blocking your instance, so you might need to self-host and hope you don’t end up imported on some blocklists for also following people from the wrong instances, or running the wrong software, etc.  Furthermore, there aren’t a lot of promoters for a more neutral fediverse but rather the Mastodon idea of a more political one. You’re never getting off a blocklist unless you compromise your community, no amount of explaining will do the trick. There’s of course instance infighting and blocklists as well, but no idea of a centralized universal blocklist. Instead, some instance owner adds another instance to the list after someone sends the admin a photo of his face photoshopped onto something. The only universal blocks tend to be blocks relating to pedophile harboring instances for the most part.But still, on a freer fediverse instance aside from seeing “Follow Requested” a lot, you can also expect threads to look broken like this, until you view them on the original site. This is thanks to “signed” or “authorized fetches”, which as I’ve mentioned earlier only serve to break the fediverse so a few paranoid people can act like nobody is making fun of them on the internet. Many instances thankfully don’t use this, but many in fact do. This can also be seen if an instance has disabled signed fetches.You’ll learn this the hard way because many instances hide their lists.Much of the developments from this crowd are less about censorship and fake ideas of security, and more about new features. Emoji reacts, quote posting, several attempts at chat functionality, and a functioning search are many features this side of the fedi pioneered or has that Mastodon lacks. People on the Mastodon side are surprised to hear about features Pleroma has, but as a result of the “bad people” using it many will use Akkoma to signal to the crowd (which offers only hugboxing features over mainline Pleroma). It doesn’t matter how much Moon, or Lain, or someone else in the Pleroma circle tries to pander to the transgender community for example. This is exactly how they will forever be seen:Of course, this kind of thing is protested hard on this side of the fedi too by a few powerusers. The fedi block API script is designed to catalogue blocks from instances that didn’t hide it. Some instances deliberately disable signed fetches to protest the behaviors of instances that abuse this. Another script I can’t find even goes as far as sending fake signed fetches with another domain to bypass the federation issues. Some users take it to the extreme of MRFs that reject deletion requests or that strip away scope info for non-DM posts to protest “lockfags” doing it. There’s even people having too much fun with Mastodon search being hashtag based, by spamming hashtags to absolutely flood the feeds of Mastodon users (if you copy and paste a ton of hashtags and make sure to include both #mutualaid and #fediblock and then just shitpost, you’ll cause chaos. Ask me how I know this.)There’s of course also drama to be expected with this side; which isn’t unsurprising when people who hate each other and don’t put on the illusion of teaming up are thrown into a room. You can’t be shocked that an Akkoma instance where the owner literally links to a “Gender Acceleration” paper is blocking people on the designated side of the fediverse. But some drama storms like the Alex Gleason drama or Poast deciding who to block just scream “trailer park level drama”, like redneck truckers on a CB radio band accusing each other of being gay. You have no idea where or how the feud started, but they want to beat the fuck out of each other for the purpose of appearing badass or something.Despite this, this side of the fediverse is nicknamed the “fun side” because it’s the one place the moderators hold no power over online.The short versionThere’s a lot of fault lines you could point at to summarize the difference between each side of the fediverse. There’s signed/authorized fetches vs working normally. There’s software usage. There’s the positions of admins on free speech or trans issues (which 10 years ago might as well have not existed). But in reality, after looking back at both, there’s a very simple dividing line.One side wants to use the fediverse to escape social media platforms, to post without the fears of moderators against fun or censoring discussion/content.The other side wants to use the fediverse because they feel that Twitter wasn’t and isn’t censoring hard enough. They want censorship features and features to enable a larger hugbox (see Akkoma’s “bubble”, turning on signed fetches by default, turning off relay functionality by default, etc.) and will try to force everyone around them to do the same.Only one side will end up sticking with the fediverse because they have nowhere else to go that doesn’t involve subtle behavior modification (see everything YouTubers will do to stay monetized), the other side will leave after another bit of drama and say “oof yikes the admins are heckin problematic”. In the past, users have not been thrilled about the idea the neutered fediverse Mastodon offers, and this has tainted the name of Mastodon heavily. Who knows where the fedi will be in 5 years, but the truth is this is exactly where the dividing line is with the fediverse.But either way; as a result of all of this there are two massively distinct fediverse userbases and cultures only kept apart by powertripping administrators on the censor happy side who want to make sure that you never see anything bad online ever. https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/11/22/two-fediverses-one-network/#fediblock #mutualaid
       
 (DIR) Post #Ac6uQacqGzPMnbyJ9s by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2023-11-23T21:22:39Z
       
       4 likes, 4 repeats
       
       Previously, I’ve made other posts about some of the various cancers on the fediverse, be it signed fetches or carpet blocklists. I’ve also made a post about how the marketing efforts of the Mastodon crowd and forced division have created a “what instance should I join/recommend” issue. These 3 posts summarize many of the problems with the fediverse including the lack of transparency behind the blocks, but there’s one more trick that has been done with a few fediverse clients (Tusky is one example) but taken to new extremes. This client summarizes everything wrong with the Mastodon side of the fediverse, but also illustrates why it’s going to fail.Feditext: when the blocks are built inToday I heard about drama involving a fediverse client known as Feditext, and what the creator has done to the users of the client. Now on phones, fediverse/social media clients or “apps” are massively popular. These offer the polish of a phone app, linked into your website of choice. In fact, this is one of the reasons Gab moved to a modified Mastodon software stack, the developers wanted to take advantage of the wide array of Mastodon apps that exist (Gab is banned from the app store). This resulted in a giant flamewar in 2019 leading F-Droid to even issue a statement as some developers chose to block “problematic” instances at a client level to “own the chuds”. After all this though two apps stood out for their stance to not block instances, Fedilab and Husky (a pleroma extended fork of Tusky, which did block instances). Server blocklists aren’t enough, you have to block the instances in the clients to get the mean people off the fediverse.Anyhow, I really don’t know too much about what goes on in the Apple ecosystem and I could care less because I’m not a fan of heavily locked down phones that are literally security theater, but I’ve heard about this new fediverse app called Feditext that is pulling the same behavior. The backstory for this app is this; there was this Mastodon app called Metatext for it and then the developer got sick and it was abandoned. Then someone else made a fork of it and now it’s on Github, even though it hasn’t been touched in 5 months. I never heard of it, so I popped it in the biggest search engine and what do you know, there’s already the usual shibboleths. What a nice start. Something else you should notice is that Pleroma is conspicuously absent, there’s a good reason for this that I will explain why later. Also worth noting is that it’s not even on the app store, but only in test flight/beta mode. Nice.Now normally this might have been a good app. Maybe it’s not. I don’t know, I don’t own an iPhone and I’d rather not own one. If I wanted to impress trashy women in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, I’d get myself a used BMW on Craigslist or Copart or something. But there’s just one small problem. You see, the developers of this app love to hardcode blocklists in, and this is how I found this app, through a fediverse thread talking about it. The first post is of a screenshot interaction with the developers of this client with the OP of the fediverse thread, puzzled by the fact that a blocklist would be baked into a client.After being unable to find stereophonic.space in the code itself, a fedi user found out that in “ServiceLayer/Sources/ServiceLayer/Services/InstanceURLService.swift“, there is a bloom filter in the code that compares instances.Now the bloom filter itself is designed to be “unreadable” so that the darn CHUDS can’t read it. The code itself in the same file is also booby trapped so that you will get an “instance not supported” error if the instance is flagged as problematic. Essentially, the piece of code is a new version of the infamous “AARD code” that was used as evidence in court cases. Of course what happens is the user will end up one starring the app over this.As it turns out, the obfuscated list reveals that a lot of fediverse instances popular in freer side of the fedi are blocked.So why did I reveal the best for last (as in who made this client)? Well; here’s where it gets funny. The creator of this has a hard-on for blocking people online. One look at the fedi.software profile for Feditext tells you exactly who made this fork: none other than Vyr.Now where have we heard the name Vyr before? Well, aside from being mentioned in my previous posts on the issue linked at the beginning, Vyr has a huge obsession with blocking bad people online. From an abandoned list for detecting and blocking Soapbox instances because of years old posts of the developer:Which unblocks you if you run a fork of it (that might have issues, just because Alex Gleason is a stupid (keemstar.gif)):To carpet blocking Pleroma instances because Alex Gleason used to be on the team (and the mean people run the instances but Akkoma is fine).In short, when the control freaks can’t get power from making blocklists, they’ll work on fediverse client software and take the blocklists to the software itself. Even if you build the software itself, you have to strip out and modify the software to remove any sort of lists like this! It makes me wonder if this was the motive behind it, or if politics are just so ingrained in these people that they can’t let it go for 5 minutes. Maybe it’s both honestly.When “Internet Tough Guys” programOne of the things to note with even FOSS software is that it’s very risky to trust software made by people who openly hate you, want you dead, and think it’s funny over some miniscule dispute online. This is a problem that is widespread and isn’t just limited to a single developer. Rather, it’s both the final form of “politics are everything” in programming while also being a classic longstanding FOSS problem; namely the “internet tough guy” problem. There are a lot of people who will sabotage their code and services or ignore bug reports and contributions to feel like badasses on the internet. Or maybe they want to do it to protest something, at the expense of everything else and their professional career.Hector Martin, Drew Devault, and whoever is the guy behind GrapheneOS come to mind. Hell, even the XScreenSaver guy could count as one given he’ll send rants if you port his software to Windows (don’t do this, and especially don’t send him thugs kissing if he harasses you). Probably the most notorious example of all of these is the GrapheneOS saga. The guy behind it is notorious for a feud with Louis Rossmann, accusing him of all sorts of things to the point of sending Louis Rossmann hate texts and threats while Louis was making a video talking about this saga. In fact; he deleted GrapheneOS because the developer was such a loose cannon, he didn’t trust software written by him (all over a comment he had left on a video):Internet tough guys can be really terrible for infrastructure critical projects, as the infamous npm colors saga or the npm package nuking your hard disk if it “thought” you were from Russia saga showed. Why would you trust a piece of software made by someone who will nuke your hard drive because he thinks you’re against the current thing?Which is the problem with fediverse client software made by untrustworthy developers like this. Would you trust a fediverse client written and maintained by someone who has an inaccurate “bloom filter” done for the sole purpose of keeping mean people from using the client? Or would you trust one made by someone who might post on a problematic instance but has stated that software should just work?https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/11/23/if-you-cant-block-em-block-em-harder-feditext-and-hard-coded-client-blocklists/
       
 (DIR) Post #AcUB77W2Rfwos5Aa6y by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2023-12-05T02:47:10Z
       
       8 likes, 10 repeats
       
       Not long ago, a previous blog post I made talked about how the difference between the Mastodon side of the fediverse and the rest of the fediverse boiled down to one thing. One side wants to use the fediverse to escape social media platforms, and one side wants to use it because Twitter isn’t censoring hard enough. There was one glaring flaw in this however, and that is I forgot a group that lands somewhere in between the two; users with Musk Derangement Syndrome.See Elon Musk has had an interesting career. A decade ago his company was a favorite of the left; in particular because while traditional automakers were caught in emission scandals, only selling hybrids in 3-4 states to boost CAFE (fuel economy) numbers, or being painted as the force of evil thanks to the infamous GM EV1 fiasco (tl;dr, GM made an electric car, pushed it hard, and then because it was a lease made all the owners give them back to be crushed), Elon Musk didn’t care. He tripled down on what he saw the future was: battery electric powered cars. While the other companies seemed to not care about alternatives such as Hydrogen (which has zero infrastructure, not merely limited) and VW/other European companies completely fumbled the ball with the diesel emission scandals, Tesla was making electric cars and actually selling them.I say selling instead of marketing them because until 2023, Tesla didn’t even need to market because the word of mouth was just that huge. They didn’t need to run ads as they were the darling of every single green car blog, politicians were driving them as status symbols, with owners who just love gloating about not paying high prices at the pump. In fact, Tesla might as well have taken the Apple model of “reality distortion field” and applied it to the car industry, mixing the brand worship of Apple with the smug comment warfare of internet liberals and creating a sales success.And then Elon Musk became known for mean tweets and not exactly being left wing, and that’s when the hit pieces began. I wish I had a timeline on this because I’m disconnected from whatever the TV is saying these days, but I’ll say this. With Donald Trump out (after creating a cottage industry of balding men trying to be the first to reply to a Donald Trump tweet), the same reply guys who obsessed over him changed their focus to Elon Musk. Sure, the mainstream media theatrics are still focused on some show trial and “TRUMP SAID A THING”, but online there are a lot of people angry at Elon Musk. Now Twitter was very notorious for doing a lot of suspicious things under it’s previous CEOs, which were then confirmed with the Twitter Files posts, but most importantly a switch went off and suddenly the cattle on Twitter began to realize they had been getting screwed over. Of course, as they’re unable to rationalize it any other way the hate was directed at Elon Musk. This was made worse by the fact that Twitter’s useless staff who had been fired were really, really, good at theatrics for the Twitter crowd.While this was going down, many Twitter midwits angry at Tesla Man needed a new place to go to. So these users went to the fediverse, because they heard it was just like Twitter but without the Tesla man in charge. Unsurprisingly they’ve been kind of pissed off at the community. As you’d expect, they’ve been clashing with the Mastodon side over not talking like a Tumblr user (using CWs for everything, alt-text, the whole 9 yards) but there’s something else I find interesting. These people have never ever been in a social media network without algorithms and coddling.The Fedi Difference ™The fediverse is not like a normal social network. The fediverse timeline seems to act more akin to an RSS feed or the old-school Twitter timeline as opposed to the modern Twitter timeline which can hide posts without you knowing, shove posts in your face, and whatnot at will. If you think finding yourself either next to Tumblr users screaming that you didn’t CW a picture of your burger and fries or racism enjoyers into anime girls was a culture shock, it’s another one to realize that there’s no magical algorithm on the site. This is by design, one side will think it’s how hate speech and literal genocide spreads, and the other side will say it censors people with “shadowbans” or “throttles” (and as it came out as well, had some connections with the FBI). Others will say it kills their engagement online.On the fediverse, there is none of this, especially if you run an instance yourself. Your timeline is what you are fed from who you follow, period, with a “whole known network” timeline being for content from instances yours knows about (that haven’t had federation broken thanks to Signed/Authorized fetches or are in your instances blacklist). There are no centralized moderators deleting posts or hiding content that might seem “spammy” to you, like frequent posters. But most importantly, you can’t click a button to make it go away.This is an extreme culture shock to anyone expecting an algorithm (but not that one). There are none, period. The closest thing to one is Mastodon with it’s explore function that can be seen on many instances such as Mastodon.social giving you posts that are liked by people the instance knows about. In fact, if you go to many instances with Mastodon 4.x, you will see this tab. Let’s see what’s on Mastodon.soc…oh wait this is way too on the nose. Darn it.Let’s scroll some, yeah that’s more like it. Safe /r/all level posts and “Trump bad”.Okay that’s odd. Let’s see what it’s like on a retrotech instance:I don’t need to go further, you get the point already. The trending tabs on Mastodon are the same kinds of garbage you can find on Twitter and as I’ve mentioned in the previous post, the instances are also run by the same kinds of people who ran Twitter into the ground. But otherwise, there’s not an algorithm on the main timeline to my knowledge, or for your replies, and whatnot. I know Pleroma lacks one, that’s for sure. This matters, because it’s leading into the point I’m making here today.Some people do need a walled gardenNow that I’ve mentioned just how much of a culture shock it is using the fedi as opposed to Twitter, let’s talk about a recent meltdown. A lot of tech enthusiasts have been moving to Mastodon because they know the computer thing, and this means that ecelebs in that circle are naturally following them. Case in point; Technology Connections. He’s a YouTuber who has managed to win the algorithm game with videos like “here’s something nifty that you never bothered to look into”, with very autistic video topics.Unfortunately, his autism that allows him to get massive numbers of views talking about “cool things you never noticed” extends to his social life and this is where the fun begins. Technology Connections has been posting a lot of greatest hits on the fediverse for the past few weeks, including but not limited to “I wish I could control what people say about me online”:To feeling he’s being gangstalked:To wishing the moderator in the sky would take care of posts:While then in the same thread telling people he’ll take on anyone in a fedi fight:Despite all these complaints about the network, he cannot just leave it. In fact, he drops his handle in a video description for a video he uploaded four days ago:Older videos of his on the flipside have Twitter links, which is now private because Musk Bad.Now while these posts are funny, they’re not why I’m sharing them. The point of me sharing them is simple. It’s to illustrate a third type of user on the fediverse. He really wants old Twitter to come back, as in 2019-2020 Twitter. Not of course the Twitter which as one viral tweet said, would let you tell random people how to cook crack in the microwave. Nah, he wants the Twitter of shadowbans where the “quality filter caught most insufferable people”. On Twitter he was an e-celeb and could feel like a king. On the fediverse he’s a nobody to many people, an example of never meet your heroes to others, and an episode of the Jerry Springer show to yet another group. It’s just they’re now shouting “WORLD STARRRRR” or posting it to rdrama.net instead of shouting “JERRY JERRY JERRY”. This of course is either an ego dent, or a situation he’s never had to handle in his life.Now imagine a lot of people online, used to the reporting tools and blocking tools of Twitter.com, thrust into an online sphere where they have no power. Where someone could be shit talking you online and you wouldn’t even know, it wouldn’t even pop up in the Google Alert under your own usernames and real name. Where the person you blocked can still see your posts if they federate to him, enough to call you names online that you’ll never see. This absolutely breaks this third demographic on the fediverse; since unlike Kiwi Farms or 4chan or rdrama or whatever scrapegoat exists this month, it’s at your doorstep and you can’t even clean it up or call for someone to. After all, Mastodon reports go to the owner of the instance who reported it. And just like Kiwi Farms handling people sending takedown emails, many times they will even be posted publicly.Arguably you could say his posts were intended for a different purpose, to make Mastodon developers add in algorithms and similar to reduce harassment, but the userbase of Mastodon does not want this. In fact, you could argue it would silence trans and BIPOC voices just like how HP webcams were racist. He’s also not the first person who would call for such a thing, if anything he’d be the 300th idea guy to this week. He will either have to get used to it, or log off of social media for his own mental health because Twitter right before Elon Musk took over is never going to come back unless the US government steps in and sells it to Google or the ADL or something.In other words, the fediverse is not Twitter. If it’s getting to you, just log off instead of aggravating the situation and trying to fight everyone. https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/12/04/you-dont-understand-i-need-my-internet-daddy/
       
 (DIR) Post #AcwqrpyV1XEEiNJSVs by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2023-12-18T22:47:52Z
       
       2 likes, 2 repeats
       
       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 sitesSo 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 siteCan 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 InkbunnyThe 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 multiplemigration 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 sitesSo 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 scareThis 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 winsSo 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/
       
 (DIR) Post #AdAxp64jsTSce1DPxg by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2023-12-25T18:11:37Z
       
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       Ever since the fall of DeviantArt and furry art galleries burning up, I’ve had a theory that someone should start a new art site. When I realized that would be impractical given the risks and drama associated, I put this idea to the back of my mind. Then when I discovered the fediverse I realized, it could work but as something in the fediverse. After all, it’s something the internet sorely lacks and that I could make a good use case for using the fedi for. Unfortunately I’m just an idea guy as of now, so I’m posting this in the hopes that either I’ll remember this or someone else will.One Loss Condition (or how the fedi can still win)Before I talk about art sites, I’d like to talk about the one loss condition for any big social media platform. What do I mean by one loss condition? Well, a blackpilling post from a host of an infamous website circa 2019 essentially said that in the social media sphere, there was “no loss condition” against the big tech companies. The post for context was written in better economic times, when it seemed like big tech companies had an infinite spigot of money from investors to prop up a website that made no money, after all why do you think Jeff Bezos bought a newspaper? The post highlights that YouTube never made money, and then points to what was at the time YouTube’s latest announcement that they will in fact manipulate what you see.To summarize: if you watch something Alphabet does not want you to watch, it will start suggesting videos it does want you to watch. They go for the benign and easy example of Flat Earth Theory. If you watch a video about how the Earth is flat, it will propose you watch an ‘authoritative’ video on how that isn’t true. YouTube will start doing this with everything it wants, in accordance to its political objectives, and it will not tell you suggestions are politically motivated when doing so.This continues to this day, with YouTubers complaining about how they can’t get views and asking why this is the case (it’s the algorithm):While BreadTubers and approved political content creators will always be recommended by the algorithm, such as Not Just Bikes (an urban “soyboy” out of touch with America’s demographics as one blogger described him):That’s in between channels such as MrBeast, who always seem to show up on a frontpage on a private tab, without fail in between slop “playlist” videos and compilations that are stuck in 2008.Essentially, YouTube is pretty much a great example of how a big tech site can kill a community while also illustrating everything wrong with big tech in one site. The only saving grace with YouTube is that “at least it’s not Twitch”, but YouTube rules have been slowly following Twitch when it comes to censorship and how strict they are. If you’re wondering why videos depicting crazy events on YouTube have to have 4000 disclaimers declaring it’s bad as if you’re watching a North Korea propaganda video, this is why. If you get a strike on YouTube, to even start the 6-month timer you now have to go through a “copyright school” reeducation session online. It’s literally that bad these days.Anyhow; back to the post since I’m sure you get my point that YouTube sucks. The post starts by talking about how it’s only targeting Americans with this propaganda measure (not to worry as in 2022, YT would roll this out on countries taking in refugees, with a Google corporate propaganda post using the term “prebunking“). This is also mentioned here with how Google could in theory, push LGBT related channels in a Slavic country (where the older generation is not a fan of it but the younger generation is apathetic, see Japan too) if it thinks the user is underage (and kids have come out as trans from YouTube channels from influencers saying “this fixed me”). He also mentions the panopticon of Facebook, the illusion of choice it offers with Instagram/Whatsapp being owned by them, and Twitter’s shady algorithm (that would be confirmed later with the Twitter Files, along with FBI involvement).But most importantly, it mentions that alternative sites were “containment sites”, with no reason to join if you weren’t banned from Twitter and even if you’re not banned; you’ll find it hard to reach a new audience outside the echo chamber. It mentions how a Twitter news reposter/journalist was banned from the platform for “ban evasion” because he pissed someone off and had been banned before, and how essentially if you’re locked out of Twitter you’re locked out of one of the most important websites (this is why Elon Musk called it a “digital town square” and he was 100% right).Yet the point he made with all these issues he mentioned is very simple. In 2019, these corporations were truly the epitome of “too big to fail” or they seemed that way. They seemingly had infinite money to burn, and nothing short of rules requiring social media neutrality or payment processor neutrality (which in his eyes, is one of the biggest roadblocks to alternative sites) would peacefully neuter them. While the post throws out the idea of attacks on the headquarters of big tech companies, it also mentions that it’s unlikely to do anything given the CEOs are already living on private islands and the developers are expendable.I disagree with this final assumption, especially with the state of the internet in 2023. I think that there is such a loss condition for Twitter and especially smaller sites. Twitter being a “digital public square” and huge online has given it immunity from many things that would kill smaller sites. So far Twitter has managed to withstand among other things:A very divisive ownerBan waves and “soft censorship” like throttlingEven the POTUS being banned pre-MuskBluechecks doxing people while being followed by Jack Dorsey (complete with a guest appearance from an infamous consent accident haver)Layout changesKilling features people likedA site renameForcing you to login to view most postsTumblr’s userbase migrating over and bringing over its harassing behaviorJournalists and Bluechecks no longer getting special treatmentThe ADL being madThe thing with Twitter is, it seems too big to fail. Many of these things have killed similar sites, but Twitter’s status as a digital town square means that people will come back over and over again, even after being constantly harassed by mentally ill users because a different Twitter account used them as an attack dog. For a site the size of Twitter to go down, what it needs to do is go down for maybe a month or months at a time, with uncertainty about it’s future. The second thing is that users need a similar, well-polished website to go to that actually works. As seen with No Man’s Sky, the currently still dodgy Halo Master Chief Collection, Windows Vista, the Xbox One announcement, and many more products and services, a poor first impression can taint something forever (especially if it’s not fixed quickly). If there isn’t a new website that exists right then and is ready to handle the load, one of three things will happen:Users will migrate to a dissimilar website right away (post-Porn ban Tumblr)Users might try to migrate to a new site, only to find out that there’s drama, infighting, admins who aren’t up for the task, and then move to some dissimilar site anyway.This can be seen with the collapse of 8chan and Fred’s war on imageboard culture, leading to the webring trashfire, 8chan becoming 8kun, and then Mark schisming off into his own little website called 8chan.moe (really only used for /v/, which he was the admin of).Not all bunkers were failures. In at least one case with the 4chan /qa/ board being locked after the infamous /lgbt/ raid, the “sharty” would replace it and be completely unchained from 4chan’s rules.There will be a void where there is just someone waiting to fill the void (Vine).The last one is the one I want to talk about here, because this is where it gets interesting. See, Twitter bought this really cool video sharing app called Vine or something where you could share 7 second videos and it was massive. There were so many dancing videos, dumb jokes/memes, and similar in the app, and you could find these by infinitely scrolling. Gee, this sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well I’ll get to that in a moment, but instead of showing you what was on the app I’ll show you how the app was used.So the story for Vine was identical to that of every interesting tech company of the late 2000s-mid 2010s. They had a good thing going for them with this app, they cashed out to be bought by a bigger tech company, and what do you know it got shut down. Vine lasted from 2013 to around 2016-7, but it’s brief impact was clearly felt. Why do I say this? Well in 2016 I’m sure someone in China saw that this Vine app was big, and as normal in the Chinese tech market some tech CEO was there with their state approved clone of it: Douyin. In 2018 their worldwide app (known as TikTok) was launched, and in 2020 the app would just explode.Sure, TikTok allows videos longer than 7 seconds, but what made TikTok big wasn’t that. It was that it picked up on a void Vine left behind, namely the “infinite scrolling” part and capitalized on this aspect of the app. It’s not uncommon to be in a room of wagies just mindlessly scrolling short TikTok videos of under a minute, and then scrolling to the next one. This is because TikTok capitalized on the void Vine left, and then maximized user engagement and hooking users in.It’s going to be hard to replace Twitter, because quite frankly Twitter users want something 1:1 just like Twitter complete with the algorithm, and there is nothing that is forcing people to leave. However, there is one category of sites that has a giant hole in it and this is where something could happen.The slow burn of art sitesOnce upon a time there was a website named DeviantArt. While the website was constantly mocked for low-quality fetish artwork and random anime fanartists getting big on the site, the website was a true gem. It had obscure art niches, some genuinely good artists on the site, Windows skins and similar, and more. There were groups, groups to put your art in, related tabs, and whatnot. Browsing DeviantArt eons ago makes me wish I saved more art (given how much managed to dodge archive.org and how mentally ill artists love to delete their galleries), and while much of the internet mocked the “best” of the site it had a really good thing going for it. Essentially, the layout of DeviantArt just werked. Case in point; try browsing a profile or image from 2015. You’d see related, groups it was featured in, a nice readable layout, and both from the artist and website suggestions, along with groups the image is featured in and collections. Really cool, wasn’t it? This layout was similar in 2013 as well.Unfortunately, something bad happened to DeviantArt in 2019, alongside the usual “Twitter getting big and diverting attention”. That on its own along with the Tumblr porn ban shoving more onto it was bad enough, and a post in 2019 lamented the fall of art galleries like DeviantArt. It lamented the loss of the DeviantArt community which was focused on real interaction instead of maximizing the dopamine receptors. But what really killed DeviantArt after that post was when Wix bought them just two months prior. The website would undergo multiple changes including a new puritan moderation system, but most infamously it forced a very much hated user interface down the throat of people known as “Eclipse”. This new user interface was soulless and corporate, mimicking that of another art site designed for wagies to show off their technical but “empty” artwork known as ArtStation. To say it led to a user exodus under the threat of Twitter is an understatement, as many artists abandoned their accounts. Some would even blank them after the AI training and image generator controversy.Hence; it’s not uncommon to find an artist who replaced his or her gallery with a meltdown post, which is sometimes combined with crawling into a deeper hugbox:Or let’s take a look at the artist I previously used as an example earlier, let’s see what his DeviantArt page looks like now despite him still uploading:Meanwhile other art sites aren’t much better. Newgrounds still has the reputation of being the “flash site you went to as a kid to play edgy games” and not a serious art gallery, and it had censorship scandals too at some point as well (I have also heard somewhere that the admins decide what drawings are and aren’t of age). Pixiv is Japanese for the most part and allows most art, but I’ve heard they might be censoring to pander to the whims of payment processors (I haven’t heard anything concrete other than booth.pm/fanbox cracking down on porn because of payment processors). FurAffinity is mostly furry only and the admins have been ban happy as of late for many things, also the website’s code is terrible. Inkbunny is much better than FurAffinity in the same niche, but has the containment site reputation due to allowing cub (basically furry lolisho). There are some other furry art galleries like Weasyl, SoFurry, and Furry Network that someone out there might use but these sites are irrelevant mostly since they offer nothing FurAffinity does not also have content wise. Then there’s ArtStation which is the LinkedIn or Vimeo of art sites, it’s where you post when you have talent and repress the creativity in favor of making yet another piece of high budget corporate slop, when the concept art is actually cool but the final product is meh. But all of these sites have one thing in common: they’re always a side gallery for artists when their main one is Twitter. In fact; notably missing from this artist’s profile that I used are any sort of art sites that anyone knows about. I literally never heard of Itaku until today:The problem with social media sites for art:The problem is, social media sites just suck for art. There are numerous issues with the websites including but not limited to:Discoverability just sucks, you’re stuck with hashtags only. There’s no recommended, groups, or anything.Image quality is compressed and the resolution is downsampledThe community is one of the most drama prone onlineThe most notable issue with Twitter right now is the community, and how it is prone to drama, infighting, and political drama. An old post I’d like to share that I saw from 2014 highlighted the problem with Tumblr/Twitter’s community for artists in particular too. Essentially, Tumblr only allowed you to reblog something while adding something (think quote posts on meth) with inline reply fights being extremely common.What happens is – someone makes a statement which is controversial by Tumblr standards, like “Protect Doctor Who fans from kitten pic sharers at all costs.” A kitten pic sharer sees the statement, sees red, and reblogs it to her followers with a series of invectives against Doctor Who fans. Since kitten pic sharers cluster together in the social network, soon every kitten pic sharer has seen the insult against kitten pic sharer – as they all feel the need to add their defensive commentary to it, soon all of them are seeing it from ten different directions. The angry invectives get back to the Doctor Who fans, and now they feel deeply offended, so they reblog it among themselves with even more condemnations of the kitten pic sharers, who now not only did whatever inspired the enmity in the first place, but have inspired extra hostility because their hateful invectives are right there on the post for everyone to see. So about half the stuff on your dashboard is something you actually want to see, and the other half is towers of alternate insults that look like this:Essentially the #1 problem with Tumblr’s community is that it was full of miserable people, empowered by the features on Tumblr’s website. Even without Tumblr, these people thrive on Twitter and no matter how hard you try to avoid them, they are always and I mean always on the timeline. It doesn’t matter what you do. While many furries remember when every furry porn artist was saying something about George Floyd to avoid being canceled, the same thing went on over at Tumblr all the damn time:If you’re not on Tumblr, you might have missed the “everyone who does not reblog the issue du jour is trash” wars. For a few weeks around the height of the Ferguson discussion, people constantly called out one another for not reblogging enough Ferguson-related material, or (Heavens forbid) saying they were sick of the amount of Ferguson material they were seeing. It got so bad that various art blogs that just posted pretty paintings, or kitten picture blogs that just reblogged pictures of kittens were feeling the heat (you thought I was joking about the hate for kitten picture bloggers. I never joke.)When art communities moved to Twitter, a website with less discoverability and community interaction, this problem became so much worse. Yet these social media platforms are addicting, both with Twitter giving you more exposure but also how easy it is to get involved with outrage porn. Speaking of that; it’s not uncommon for Twitter artists to get mobbed by Roblox kids and similar when they see something they don’t like, meaning that even this whole idea is controversial in this day and age. To add to that the internet is irreversibly fragmented in a way never seen before. In the words of an rdrama post I’ll paraphrase, one political side thinks the worst thing you can do as a person is to murder someone or sexually abuse kids, while the other side sees the worst thing you can do is being heckin racist.Where do we go from here?Here’s the problem: trying to make a new art site traditionally is going to be a nightmare. If you ban something, you risk giving people no reason to sign up or you’ll deal with more people asking you to ban more and more. If you don’t ban something, your site is a containment site like Inkbunny is. Keep in mind, as the loli question shows you will get militant replies on both sides. There’s going to be payment processor issues (see FurAffinity and AlertPay, PayPal in general, Patreon’s current issues), possibly web hosting issues from crazy people going after your site for posting art they don’t like (see: the early days of e621), and most important groups that cannot tolerate each other signing up. It will not work, and if you want proof, just ask the furry fandom:Thanks to social media, groups being diluted by “normies”, and most importantly every schmuck finding out he can get social capital on twitter.com by pretending to be morally outraged by something, there are a lot of incompatible groups online. Being someone like me overlapping with several incompatible subcultures is a recipe for disaster as with most people, interests and hobbies are like your cable TV and come as a package deal. Just like how you can’t save money by dropping ESPN or sportsball channels, you can’t be a shitposter and furry without causing massive amounts of chaos. If you are a furry, you are also expected to have leftist politics (which these days means gay sex, supporting people who secretly hate that, and giving kids Lupron/HRT) and you can find posts from both sides saying the same thing. Even better, a documentary made by a person of gender even serves to solely reinforce this mindset, that said community is a package deal of politics alongside being a monoculture. This only serves to worsen this problem.Yet at the same time, the art gallery landscape falls into the loss condition for what makes a big social media site fail: art sites are essentially dead at this point and they are leaving a big website shaped void online. A few years ago while out vaping I came up and then gave up on the idea of making a new art site for this reason. But a few years later, with the mental clarity afforded by my discovery of the fedi, I have come up with a solution possibly for this.Enter the federated art gallerySo here is why I think the future of art sites is going to be federated somehow. First of all; in this climate it is impossible to recreate old websites without being forced to cave to avoid losing payment processors of some sort or hosting (and especially scaring users, given online artists are easily offended). The culture that worked in 2012 will not work again in 2023 given how fractured and divided the internet is. The hosting model has to adapt.This is where the federated model pays off. It avoids the containment site problem by being federated. As a bonus, it allows anyone on Pleroma/Mastodon/Misskey to repost your art, meaning you already are given an audience. Finally, it takes care of the “what content can you host” issue by leaving it up to each admin with the possibility of being self-hosted. This isn’t even speculation either, two fediverse instances have become well used among artists: baraag.net (which has minimal censorship) and misskey.io (which has “Japanese rules” as in the censor bars). While they still suffer from the Twitter timeline model, both websites are now some of the largest on the fediverse. Furthermore, Misskey.io has helped make Misskey even larger than Pleroma when it comes to fediverse instance software. Both websites have boomed hosting in particular, content that on other sites would get nuked with “blocking tags alone is not enough”.The fediverse didn’t take off because of fediblocking, it took off in spite of it. It took off because when you are banned from all of the big social media sites at the same time, or are targeted by a smear campaign accusing you of making someone kill himself, you can still post and the best part is, you can post away from the people who want to scream in every chat you post in. The fediverse is where the last remnants of imageboard culture went after Fred thought he had snuffed it out with his buddies in the media and furry erp harem. I feel it is where the next generation of art site will happen, at least with the artists who can see where the wind is blowing and aren’t chasing dollar signs like a cat chasing a laser pointer.Maybe it won’t be solely stock activitypub, given that a lot of features DeviantArt has might not exactly work over it. After all ActivityPub is designed to be for Twitter clones for the most part it seems (see: how lemmy threads look on Masto/Pleroma). But given that artists have staying power even more than ecelebs do (leading to more users joining as a result), this would actually be a boost for any sort of federated network.Maybe one day I’ll decide to write this, but right now it’s above my pay grade. My goal right now is to even learn basic programming and maybe art, so I’m honestly going to be focusing on that. I’m just throwing this idea out there for if I get around to it, or when someone else gets the same idea as I do and implements this. https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/12/25/a-federated-art-site-proposal/#1
       
 (DIR) Post #AdewMJozAdmA4xarq4 by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2024-01-09T05:16:17Z
       
       8 likes, 8 repeats
       
       So today on the fediverse, I learned that Substack is literally doing what any other website that gets a lick of attention does, and that is banning the users who made them big, in this case anyone “branded” as a Nazi. Substack got big based on its lax moderation, but now that Substack wants to become Medium 2 down to it’s moderation policies, it’s now beginning to censor people online. Judging by the article, this is because it caught the attention of corporate whores (who began to wave their big corporate dicks around as a demand):Last month, 247 Substack writers issued an open letter asking the company to clarify its policies. The company responded on December 21, when Substack co-founder published a blog post arguing that “censorship” of Nazi publications would only make extremism worse.McKenzie also wrote that “we don’t like Nazis either” and said Substack wished “no-one held those views.” But “we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away,” he wrote. “In fact, it makes it worse. We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.”The statement seemed to be at odds with Substack’s published content guidelines, which state that “Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes.”In its aftermath, several publications left the platform. Others, including Platformer, said they would leave if the company did not remove pro-Nazi publications.Meanwhile, more than 100 other Substack writers, including prominent names like Bari Weiss and Richard Dawkins, signed a post from writer Elle Griffin calling on Substack to continue with its mostly hands-off approach to platform-level moderation.From its inception, McKenzie and Substack co-founder Chris Best have touted freedom of speech as one of Substack’s core virtues. As a result, the platform has been embraced by fringe thinkers, who have built large businesses while promoting anti-vaccine pseudo-science, Covid conspiracy theories and other material that is generally restricted on mainstream social networks.To translate this, the Ivory Tower is really mad right now that people have a centralized place to post, which means enough is enough. The problematic people have to go. Even worse, they’re not allowed to make money. So as a result, they have to go or the big names will go, and maybe even harass payment processors in the process as usual. Sure, they’re removing 5 blogs (without naming them of course), but anyone who saw CloudFlare censor sites because the CEO literally woke up in a bad mood only to say “we double pinkie swear we won’t do this again” before in fact doing it again remembers: they were lying. Substack is essentially on a death watch at this point, and anyone who didn’t have a plan B of wordpress is going to find themselves boned hard.Do you want know who is completely untouched by this censorship? If you said “someone who self hosts their own blog”, congratulations, you won. In fact, many people who would fall under that branding have been hosting their own wordpress blogs for years to avoid any sort of Automattic and Google censorship. But I might as well prove my point by outlining what someone I knew on Discord years ago called the “internet cycle”. The Internet Cycle is something that every single tech company ends up falling into, but I’ll let him explain it first before I explain it again in more detail.Stage 1: The creation (We’re not like the other guys)So here’s the deal: you’re out of college or something and you want that VC money. After all, there’s plenty of VC money to go around, or so it seemed for a while before the rise of interest rates. Anyhow when interest rates are low, this money flows all over the place, and when you’re looking to raise money from the old school types, you just have to solve a problem nobody thinks exists. Or maybe you’re from a big tech company that has fallen victim to its own success and stagnated like Google, and you’re disillusioned with the state of things. You want to make things better, and you think you have an idea: Make something like XYZ but with hookers and blow.It could be messaging like Discord, or it could be blogging like Substack and thousands of blogging sites, be it LiveJournal, Blogspot, WordPress.com (this site), and many more. Or it could be social networking, like with Bluesky and Nostr having Jack Dorsey around at some point. But here’s your goal, you’re going to be not like those other guys, you promise this time. So you go and launch this website and it’s going to be better than your previous website was.Stage 2: GrowthYou then launch this website, and you get users somewhere. How you advertise it comes down to varying tactics. You can pull a Discord, get streamers to use this program, and then everyone and their mom uses it. Maybe you can even advertise it with “we’re not like the other guys”. Discord famously did this early on.While Discord was initially for gamers as it’s marketing would brag, what Discord did to get users in was to be as open as Goatse was. The same trend could be seen with other tech sites including Reddit, Substack, and even with copyright content such as with YouTube. These websites got big based on something you could host at one time, which led users in and then led to more people joining in to post on this website. That’s really cool.But this is how a lot of these sites hook users, by being as lax as possible. Tumblr infamously did this too, by the time the porn ban happened the site was so popular as despite its community being the most hostile online, central moderation was asleep at the wheel.Stage 3: The normieficationSo after something gets big enough, eventually someone will see something problematic, usually a journalist or Twitter activist. Or some people during a protest retroactively declared illegal will use it to plan or something, or post about it there. That’s when the normiefication of a website begins or hits critical mass. That’s when the payment processors who force you to follow 5 sets of rules to make money clamp down on you. Maybe you don’t want the journalists, or SPLC/ADL types on your back, or Twitter antifa activists (who hold cushy jobs) trying to make sure your business is in ruins, or 6am girl talk sessions, or your providers cutting you off, etc.If you’re a big tech company, you have lawyers and crisis management, so you can just say that you’ll ban the bad people and maybe even work with the mafia. It’s a great way to rehab your image, while Discord’s reputation has gone from being where “the darn edgy alt right posts” to the service seemingly having a groomer server exposed every other week (and don’t get me started on amber alerts), groups that care about kids online don’t seem to have as much pull as groups trying to track down a teen who said a gamer word. Imagine if you went with a time machine and told the guy who ran Perverted Justice (the group who found pedos for Chris Hansen to humiliate on TV) that Discord, VRChat, and the like would be a thing in a few years. But at least there’s no Nazis, just men trying to groom minors and sell kids drugs and entire infrastructures set up to defend this.But also on Discord, there was a rebranding. While Discord’s reputation would go from being a “gamer chat service” to groomer paradise by the people they drove out of it, the marketing would shift around the time of the forced lockdowns to be marketing the platform for normies, to have your own personal group.This was the moment when Discord was no longer some niche gamer app, but rather as mainstream as WhatsApp is, where every wagie at your job who is under 28 has it installed on his phone.This didn’t just happen to Discord of course; it’s happened to other websites that used to have vibrant communities and have now become sterile propaganda. Reddit and YouTube also used to have vibrant communities, and now they are so sterilized that you could literally use gpt2 to simulate a convincing Reddit conversation, and don’t get me started on the slop on YouTube.Sometimes it happens out of order as well, like Tumblr banning porn as the site was massive, essentially dealing a huge blow to the site it has never been able to recover from. Now Tumblr is like MySpace, where the only people who want to use it are people who want to relive some glory days chasing the eternal dragon of the past.Stage 3 (Bad Ending):The other alternative to the website getting too big and then normiefied is the website ends up on life support like Odysee is today, or killed off like vidme was, or killed off completely like many of the smaller streaming sites were back in the day. Everyone goes back to the mainstream site and just gets defeated until the cycle repeats and this time it won’t be like the last time I promise. This doesn’t seem to happen to established sites as Skype is like a cockroach that won’t die for some reason.The AlternativeDiscord right now is known to be a very sterile dumpster fire, a shell of its former self compared to how it was nearly 10 years ago. But the people who made the site big have moved onto greener pastures. I’m talking websites with much less censorship like Telegram, or most importantly self-hosted platforms such as Matrix or XMPP. Here’s the thing, self hosted websites always win in the end for multiple reasons.The first is that using a single major platform is one big weakpoint, be it for censorship or hacking. Every single website branded as alt-tech has faced this issue. GiveSendGo was hacked, Gab had provider issues and hacking, Parler was hacked, Epik was hacked, Kiwi Farms has had the great troon war, the Daily Stormer was censored too many times, the list goes on and on. It’s a great source to attack if you want to censor people who never learn online. But having something spread out over numerous VPSes, cpanel shithosts, and colocated servers across the USA means there’s far more points to take down and not just one. This also means only people who want to see you will find you as a result, as being jacked into a big social media network is risking that some mentally unstable shut in who wants to fight people online will discover you, which means it’s over. Keep in mind, Kiwi Farms has the issues it does because of one ex-Google employee.The second is simpler. It’s that you’re not chained to the whims of whatever company is pulling the strings. When Discord purged servers starting in August 2017, so many people were caught in the crossfire. While I was not banned, Discord did force me to add and verify my phone number on my account at the time, which in the years since has been regarded as one such social media punishment to force users to “self dox”. Others I knew were not so lucky and had their accounts banned.The third is that every company that seems to be lax moderation wise either ends up being forced to clamp down the second they get slightly popular, or can’t find enough money and closes down. They will sell their users out to have a seal of approval from the big tech companies and journalist caste. Sites like Omegle end up having to shut down because of predators using them, but Discord gets to stay up.So while big tech corporations are too busy playing games to please people who can never be pleased, let’s be honest here. The future is to self host your own site, be it wordpress or whatever flashy new web blogging service with limp bizkit MP3s. The trick is to get powerful enough away from a big tech company or on your own that you can literally do whatever you want and nobody can stop you. That is, if you’re not so big that the minute you’re canned from your TV under pressure from a network, another website picks you up right then, and you can take selfies of yourself laughing at all the stuff people are writing about you.Because let’s be real, if you’re in this part of the internet, you already know the truth. No matter what you do to please someone online, it’s never going to be enough. Just laugh in their face, maybe do what the zoomers called “dab on the haters”.But at the same time, learn from the past. Don’t join the next walled garden. Join the decentralized internet, and never worry about a walled garden clamping down on its users ever again. https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2024/01/09/the-internet-cycle-a-whitepaper/
       
 (DIR) Post #AkjyeY5IR7shPLjkqe by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2024-08-08T00:40:35Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       One mistake people seem to make is that they always assume they’re going to be young forever, or that nothing could ever happen to them. Then something does, and everything is screwed or derailed by this. Now imagine that you’re running a huge art site with thousands of users logged in at once, but also you want to run it as if it’s your own personal forum, and that you might not have planned the best for when you die. This is what is going on with FurAffinity, after the death of the owner.Dragoneer and FurAffinityDragoneer was the obese, highly divisive owner of a website called FurAffinity. FurAffinity is a furry art gallery, likely the largest, and despite being held together with duct tape and flex glue, it still has users to this day. I mean shit, you can’t even get furries to use anything but PayPal. Unlike many corporate run art galleries, FurAffinity was run more like a message board, or a FOSS project with a BFDL management structure. Dragoneer in a way was to FurAffinity what Lowtax was to SomethingAwful (this comparison could apply to every non corporate owned forum too): FurAffinity was his site, period. Dragoneer was notorious for managing a site with thousands of users like his own personal message board, leading to many scandals during the history of the site. Some of which had to do with the jank code, but here’s some of his and the site’s greatest hits:Arbitrary rule changes because he felt like it. First there was cub (the furry version of lolisho) being banned, but as he aged, he would declare more and more stuff banned, driving Pokemon fanartists as an example off the site. This led to artists moving to sites like Inkbunny at first (which allows cub), and later itaku.ee (which has laxer rules on what you can upload compared to modern FA).Many failed site rewrites that led to coders leaving the site for good, and ended up being little more than vaporware.Many features other sites have implemented from tag filters, to high-res images, to multi-image submissions with alt versions (see Pixiv and Inkbunny) don’t exist, or were vaporware.Dragoneer infamously shielded notorious users (including mods outed in leaks) who were doing some nasty things. One high profile case involved an animal abuser who Dragoneer not only didn’t ban when confronted about it, but even said that because she didn’t talk about it on the site itself she couldn’t be banned.There are many cases of Dragoneer doing exactly that however. One high profile example is how Chew Fox was banned from FurAffinity for showing up on the Tyra Banks show. As the fandom got more political, so did Dragoneer, and he would follow in the steps of big tech sites by banning people for associating with the wrong people on Twitter.com or over Twitter feuds. Gee, that sounds a lot like Lowtax.Dragoneer sold the site to IMVU in 2015, only to buy the site back in 2021 after going cold turkey on his meds and giving up health insurance.Many many hacks, including a source code leak and a password leak listed on haveibeenpwnd.This is not counting other famous internet mistakes that others have made, including failing to monetize the site properly (see: DeviantArt offering printing services on top of a paid membership that probably made quite a bit of money when DA was huge, and Flickr doing the same), or how easily FurAffinity alienated users by going political.Anyhow, after buying the site back the structure of FA was that he owned the site, and he had mods and the like. You know, like any forum run by one guy. Yet as someone who has seen the downfall of sites like AssemblerGames or NeoGAF due to either the admin ditching the site (AssemblerGames and its owner Kevin) or drama with the admin (Tyler Malka and NeoGAF), I know that a single point of failure for a site as large as FurAffinity is a bad idea waiting to happen. And it finally did happen.The death of DragoneerAside from the obvious that you can assume from looking at photos of Dragoneer, and how he fit the archetype of the classic 2000s nerd stereotype (so common it was parodied on normie TV shows like The Simpsons and South Park, especially the latter’s WoW nerd), he was not exactly healthy. At the age of 40, his lungs gave out from either an infection or a cancer, and while waiting on the results of the biopsy after complaining about the medical bills on Twitter/Bsky, he croaked at the age of 40 just the other day. His death was met with reactions of sadness from furries, or more socially conscious furries reminding you that he shielded animal abusers and sex pests on his own site. Yet there’s one more elephant in the room, what’s next? In classic FA fashion, nobody knows.What is known for certain; is the site was solely owned by Dragoneer after the buyback. His LLC listed 7 employees, and another poster on bsky said that if he didn’t have a transfer upon death clause it’ll go to a court to determine it based on a will/other factors:The best-case scenario is that the site’s handed to a new owner, but nobody knows if the new owner the site inevitably gets will be any good. Maybe the new owners will run into financial issues or inherit debt from the size of it that nobody knew about (I was told FA never made money). The worst-case scenario is the site’s domain or something expires and it fades away, or his family wants nothing to do with it. If the site stays up, nothing ever happens again. Well, it might, but it’s FurAffinity so who knows if he bothered to have a backup plan. If he didn’t, it’d probably be catastrophic given the sheer amount of furries online:Other sites (Weasyl, Itaku, etc.) wouldn’t be able to handle all the traffic, and might need to beg for donations or temporarily lock down registrations.Inkbunny would have more exposure from tourists and the like who might give the site hosting issues.Furries will move out onto more “normie” art sites given FA is dead.Furries will also be forced into social media against their will, where furry drama is the worst due to having no moderators with skin in the game.So much content will be lost or stuck on “that” massive FA onion archive (this already happens due to artists rage deleting profiles because they had a bad day).In a worst-case scenario, Dragoneer didn’t plan for something to happen with his life despite running a big site. I mean, I know how it is. One day you’re driving your car and the next minute you’re waking up in an ER/stretcher, being told you survived a bad car wreck and you are not in fact living the worst dream of your life. There’s no waking up into the real world. What if you get killed by that car wreck or by being caught in the bad part of town at the wrong time? What if you get a health condition and die faster than you think to the point you can’t call up hospice and write your last will and testament?Who will get your website, or will it fade when the domain registration expires? Who will take control of your projects? Will you get the online version of the council dumping your belongings in the trash or your family doing an estate sale so they can sell the house to some landlords/flippers easier? Or will you get friends willing to keep your legacy going?With how Dragoneer set his site up and with how he was the dictator of FurAffinity, everyone is rightfully scared. Artists who didn’t formerly post a linktree/similar or links in their bios to other sites are now, or are reminding you they have it so in case their site goes down they’ll still be online.Even then, the new administration of FurAffinity has a chance to be different, and if FurAffinity going down would be a mini version of the Tumblr Porn Ban but localized to furries (where even 5-6 years later the effects can still be felt online), administration being different than Dragoneer was would be a wildcard like Elon Musk buying Twitter was, and it’s easy to remember just how bad Dragoneer was. It’s also easy to remember that unlike Lowtax, Dragoneer was paranoid and didn’t sell out.Either way, FurAffinity is now stuck with an uncertain future. Maybe it’ll improve. This did happen to Odysee, where after splitting from LBRY the owners posted an update after a year or so of an uncertain future after LBRY went down the toilet. Maybe it’ll get worse.But the point is, if you’re running a site the size and scale of FurAffinity, it’s a good idea to not run it like a message board as a BFDL/sole owner, because you never know if you’ll die tomorrow. You want the site to continue on past your body’s expiration date. Plan accordingly.https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2024/08/07/a-contingency-plan-is-always-important/
       
 (DIR) Post #Albya6LQ7gRekezhWy by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2024-09-03T01:53:27Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Part of what makes the iconic NEC PC-98 graphics style unique is the dithering on every single image. On a LCD, nice CRT, or emulator, the dithering is very obvious. However, the dithering exists for an obvious reason: the NEC monitors of the time quite frankly sucked. No really. They had a terrible dot pitch. On a nice PC, this was seen as a drawback. Don’t believe me? Here’s a YouTube video of a guy ranting about how a crummy CRT is crummy. This video is worth watching though because it goes into detail about dot pitch.The PC-KD854N was a common PC-98 and PC-88 era monitor, with a dot pitch similar to that of an EGA monitor at 0.39mm. For displaying text, this is a drawback. However, at a low resolution of 640×400 in an era when everyone was stuck with crummy hardware, developers used this to their advantage. Similar techniques were known with composite video and scanlines being used to make the image seem as if there was more to it on the screen with game consoles. However on the PC-98, everything is analog RGB (with the exception of the early models using TTL video similar to early PCs, or “digital RGB” as it was marked). Instead, the trick was to take advantage of your crummy CRT and display more colors using dithering. How common was this? Not only did numerous games use it, but many drawing programs for the platform even offered the ability to do dithered colors.I found a Twitter account a while back where the user was posting photos comparing the PC-98 output from an emulator/LCD with that of a period correct CRT, and the difference is night and day.The vaporwave aesthetic dithering is actually used to display more colors on the display. Clever trick, yet this is also how PC-98 games looked like “back in the day”. The famous 16-bit sensation manga (which unlike the anime “adaptation”, was an interesting look into how VNs and similar games were made back in the day from someone who was there) actually has a few pages discussing the dithering technique as well. For context, here are some of the pages discussing the 16-color limit and how developers loved to dither, while calling another game “magic” for it’s clever use of this.Anyhow, with this in mind and that Twitter account in mind, I decided that part of me wanted a PC-KD854N CRT one of these days. Heh, one of these days. Shipping a CRT from Japan is a nightmare cost wise, and if it’s packed improperly the CRT will get destroyed in shipping. I’m talking bent neck and all. There’s a PC-98 emulator called NP21w and several others, but NP21w (the most accurate and feature complete one) has one key omission: good luck making it do CRT shaders that are popular in the western retrogaming sphere. As a result, NP21w’s output looks like it does on an LCD and gives everyone a false impression. In other words, even on the real thing I had been looking at PC-98 graphics wrong all my life.Unfortunately, there’s no NEC CRT filter for emulators, but there is a program called ShaderGlass that lets you pipe in any program into it’s own CRT filter. By piping in NP21w and tweaking a few settings such as resolution and trying out the GTU-V050 filter (which does dithering better than any of the others), I was able to get some nice screenshots of how NP21w and PC-98 emulation would look if it had this filter.Unfortunately, the filter doesn’t work as well when the system goes into 640×200 mode…Still, for the later 640×400 games and VNs, it works wonderfully. It’s a shame this isn’t more common in PC-98 emulators yet, but the point of this post is that you’ve been looking at PC-98 screenshots wrong all your life. Every single PC-98 screenshot looks like it does on the right, while on the left is an approximation or simulation of looking closer to how it should on the real display.https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2024/09/02/youve-been-looking-at-pc-98-graphics-wrong-your-whole-life/
       
 (DIR) Post #ApDvx8uLVWKfnLN9TU by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2024-12-20T02:57:40Z
       
       0 likes, 2 repeats
       
       The NiCD and NiMH batteries killing 90s laptops (just one way they rot from the inside)Recently, my NEC PC-9821Nr15 laptop had a component burn out, either due to a loose screw in the chassis somewhere or age. Essentially, I have to hold the power switch for seconds to make the laptop power on now and stay on. Unfortunately, after tearing down the laptop, I was unable to see a “burnt” component. I have no schematics of this laptop, and I don’t think many 90s laptops have leaked boardview schematics or something like even some low-end Lenovo will these days. Nor do they have test carts, in depth documentation, and even hidden diagnostic modes like many 80s computers did. If it breaks, your best bet is to buy another. So I bought a sight unseen for the most part, PC-9821Nr166. Unfortunately, this one had hidden damage, and the damage was barely hidden in the low-quality, low-resolution YAJ images. It was sold as a junk as-is item that might or might not have leaks, and quite frankly I should have paid closer attention.Essentially, I wasted $100 on a parts donor laptop with a trashed motherboard, good LCD screen, and a dead battery that is probably leaking inside of its case. But let’s take a look at what is inside a random 90s laptop, because I want this to be a PSA. The laptop was sold as powering on to a PASSWORD DESTROYED screen. For those of you who don’t know PC-98s, that is one of the first screens you get when turning on a later PC-9821 along with SET SOFTWARE DIP SWITCH, this is to indicate that the password has been reset on models with passworded BIOSes. However, after a few attempts at powering on the laptop would power on to a solid BEEP with no video out, and then nothing.I tore the laptop apart to see what was wrong with it, and what I found was horrific. So, let’s take a look inside. The first sign of trouble was seeing corrosion in the HDD bay, and on one of the screws. This was hidden damage, buried below the modem board on this model.The keyboard had rust below it, common on Japanese PCs…mixed with corrosion.Inside, the NiMH standby battery had not only leaked, but it crawled through the multi-layer traces to the RAM slot and other parts of the board. The Lithium VL2330 battery had not leaked, as these never leak. In fact, the NiCD leakage was so bad that the connector had fused itself to the socket!Essentially what I was left with, was a nice PC-98 shaped object: a dead laptop that was only good for parts. Maybe some of the chips would be good for decapping and I’m sure the YMF288 would be a nice chip to salvage for a project, but for now it’s a useless brick that only exists as parts for another PC-98 laptop.The problem is, this is not exclusive to PC-98 laptops or NEC laptops. This is a common issue that affected numerous 90s laptops. See, 90s laptops loved to use NiCD or NiMH batteries as either the main system battery, a CMOS battery, or as a backup battery. The end result is a barely functional or nonfunctional laptop with serious issues caused by leakage. On Thinkpad 755 laptops, the battery leaks onto the keyboard membrane. On others, it corrodes the entire board. There are multiplevogonsthreads about this very issue affecting their laptops too. Due to multi-layer PCBs, a lack of schematics, and niche interest, there isn’t much that can be done to save these laptops other than to remove the NiCD batteries if they have not leaked too badly, and consider yourself lucky. If a NiCD battery is needed, you can always do what the pinball guys did and wire in a blocking diode with a lithium battery or something. No really, you can find tons of videos of pinball guys doing this to the simpler PCBs used there:With that being said, that’s not talking about the capacitor issues on old laptops too that kill them and leak as well, or rotting plastics, or vinegar syndrome. In other words, 90s laptops are rotting themselves from the inside in multiple ways!With a PC-98 desktop, or PC desktop of the era, this is not a problem. A Socket 5/7 system from the same era will probably keep working for a long period of time. They don’t have rotting plastics, rotting LCDs, or leaky caps. They just werk. If the PSU is normal/standard, you can even grab a generic PSU or adapter if it blows out, and some later PC-98 desktops like the ValueStar and Ra series do this. A PC-9821Ra20 or V200 can be upgraded with an ATX PSU from Micro Center, and the same goes with many PCs using AT or ATX PSUs.Essentially if you don’t hate yourself and don’t want parts machines, buy a desktop and save yourself the hassle.  
       
 (DIR) Post #ArCMjX2n8KEgdm1nVY by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2025-02-17T04:34:10Z
       
       1 likes, 2 repeats
       
       The Quote Debate (or the debate that breaks fedi)In the post-Trump era, internet discourse can be summarized by a famous Scott Adams post: about two movies playing in the same screen. The point of this argument is that two different people seeing the same news story of the day unfold will come to wildly different conclusions on the same event and what it represents. The idea is that while the theater is playing the same movie, two different people will see something entirely different from it, and argue about it on social media afterwards. Of course, given the whole “media literacy” debate and “THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE MAKING FUN OF YOU” (see: Starship Troppers, “Keep your rifle by your side”, among others), maybe this was a little bit too on the nose.Or how the fediverse is really just two different networks sharing the same protocol. There are two different groups, unaware of what the other is talking about until they end up in an argument and something happens. Then they’re defederated and the order is restored of both sides being blissfully unaware of the other.Yet, one of the most interesting things is how sometimes, something will lead to a debate for the same exact issue. In this case, it’s quote posts.Quote Posts: the ideaA while back during the pre-Elon Musk days of Twitter, when Twitter was still in complete and total lockstep with the other social media sites, Twitter introduced a new feature called Quote Tweets. Essentially a quote tweet is a feature where instead of retweeting, you can reply to something independent of a reply chain as a new tweet chain, with a quoted post. Even Twitter’s owner will use quote tweets all the time, I just took one look at his timeline to see random examples of this. It’s a divisive method of sharing posts or threads that is completely ingrained in the culture of the site now, and removing it would cause even more backlash than if they just didn’t add it to begin with.Quote tweets are one of the most divisive features of Twitter, and for a good reason. Some people use them as a way to retweet posts from other users and add their own commentary. Some felt they are one of the worst aspects of the site, used by professional arguers and “harassers” to rope people into flamewars. Others see quote tweet dunking as part of the site’s culture and Twitter journalists saw them as essential for communication. Like it or not, quote tweets would become an integral part of the site and different users there would have different opinions. Yet interestingly, no matter where you’re at on the fedi, nobody is in agreement.While writing this post, I did in fact find the post Sun quoted. In this case, ex-black Twitter users talk about how they need quotes as it’s an integral part of their community due to “call and response” being an integral part of AAVE and older black hit songs before rappers dominated music (see: Motown singles, gospel, white musicians who loved that music, etc.)Another infamous journalist, Taylor Lorenz, would post on Mastodon about how Mastodon desperately needs quote posts as she used it on Twitter, comparing it to the old Twitter quote method of adding RT at the end of posts that were being quoted (and which could be edited, etc.) The cons of quote tweetsYet, there’s also massive problems with the quote tweet mindset, and I’ll explain them based on who makes them. The left leaning side of the fedi hates them for harassment reasons, as users on Twitter would use them to argue in flamewars. In fact, this went back before Twitter became their home. See; Tumblr was even worse as you could not just retweet a post. You had to also add commentary of some sort to it. A good post a while back about rage bait on social media had a section dedicated just for Tumblr arguments. Essentially the tl;dr is, forced quote posting would lead to massively long flamewars incentivized by the site’s structure.What happens is – someone makes a statement which is controversial by Tumblr standards, like “Protect Doctor Who fans from kitten pic sharers at all costs.” A kitten pic sharer sees the statement, sees red, and reblogs it to her followers with a series of invectives against Doctor Who fans. Since kitten pic sharers cluster together in the social network, soon every kitten pic sharer has seen the insult against kitten pic sharer – as they all feel the need to add their defensive commentary to it, soon all of them are seeing it from ten different directions. The angry invectives get back to the Doctor Who fans, and now they feel deeply offended, so they reblog it among themselves with even more condemnations of the kitten pic sharers, who now not only did whatever inspired the enmity in the first place, but have inspired extra hostility because their hateful invectives are right there on the post for everyone to see.The end result? Your entire timeline on Tumblr would be split between stuff you wanted to see (cute furry art, porn, etc.) and some argument about something. Not mentioned is how the features of Tumblr would get overused and abused to start more flamewars, like anon asks, or people making callout blogs/hate blogs on people.So the leftist side of the internet has their own solution for bad behavior as a result of being veterans of that online war: If we can’t have people not use this feature to argue, then nobody can. This was what Eugen was thinking in 2018. This is also the mindset behind Akkoma, and why it’s had infamous updates breaking MRFs for blockbots, because that could be a harassment tool as well. Or why Soapbox/Gleasonware hid posts from users who blocked you (though his mindset was to also ripoff Twitter and what it was doing).Of course, this extremist mindset also was a thing in Mastodon in it’s whole as well; and it wasn’t uncommon to see users on Mastodon not want search because it could be used to harass people. Mastodon’s devs only changed tune when artists and similar were upset with the lack of visibility, or how the only way to be visible was to hashtag spam. Nevermind the fact it was literally security through obscurity because anyone who wanted someone to harass was probably not running Mastodon to begin with, where the devs had no qualms about not having a somewhat working search bar.The other huge con of quote tweets is simpler: it fragments discussion. A long discussion thread can be broken up when a user starts a new thread quote tweeting some random post instead of clicking RT, and this happens all the time.To add to this, if you think this is just a Mastodon issue, I can assure you, it’s not. It’s a bit hard to dig up given that pleroma instances have died since then (including many up at this time), but just 3 years ago there was an entire flamewar in the Pleroma sphere involving Alex Gleason wanting quotes, and the rest of the developers resisting for the reasons I mentioned. This was a key factor leading to the fallout between Alex Gleason and Pleroma’s developers. Yet in the end as Misskey and the many instances running Soapbox/Rebased were pushing quotes (along with the ex-Twitter users), quotes would eventually make it into Pleroma as that was the way the wind was blowing with normies expecting features.The demand for quotesI’m not a fan of quote tweets even though I’ve used them a few times, yet there’s one other important thing to mention: everyone else has it. Bluesky in particular has quotes and while it’s very easy for the quote chain to be broken due to the site’s extreme moderation methods that involve hiding posts when someone blocks you even, it has them because Twitter users want Twitter as it was in the late 2010s, exactly as it was. And therefore, quote tweets need to be there. Even worse, Bluesky is eating Mastodon’s lunch as it was exactly how Mastodon was marketed in 2017: “Twitter without the Nazis”. It has 31 million users, while mastodon.social only has around 2.5 million and according to FediDB only 11.5 million users use the fedi overall. It’s getting shouted out by radio DJs along with threads, as they cater to users not using Twitter. Of course, Bluesky is also not really decentralized and there’s no “instance question”, you just go to bsky.app and make an account.It’s obvious from the numbers that Eugen is likely shitting himself that not only users are asking en masse “dude where’s my quotes”, but also Bluesky is absolutely annihilating Mastodon in user count and users. Even if there’s so many fake users, spammers/scammers, and fake e-girls making accounts, 31 million is no joke. Bluesky is where some of the big corporations are moving to as Elon Musk becomes increasingly anti-PR friendly for companies. Yet this is Mastodon, and as he’s chosen to sleep in that bed, he’s now having to begrudgingly add quotes.Essentially, it’s a problem for anyone writing a piece of social media software; you might not want to add this feature because it’s harassment and could be used as such, but what if literally everyone online wants it? What if every single competitor to Twitter has to add it out of necessity? It’s like how Linux can’t run Fortnite even as many people who want to use Linux want to run that.Quotes (from Mastodon)To summarize where we’re at now in 2025:Eugen has never wanted to add quotes because of harassment, and a non-trivial amount of Mastodon users agree with him.Pleroma’s userbase also disliked quotes and nicknamed them as a “Gleasonware” feature, but begrudgingly had to add them because other fedi software devs don’t feel the same way.Twitter refugees are asking “dude, where’s my quotes”.Bluesky is absolutely becoming what Eugen wanted Mastodon to be, and the users don’t care about self-hosting or finding instances or whatever.Eugen has also cultivated a userbase that is just as bad as Bluesky; with hyper sensitive users wanting total control over their posts and who can see them online.Due to being stuck in this situation, Eugen has had to make a compromise and do it The Mastodon Way™. In this case, it’s with quote posts. Two days ago, “The Mastodon Team” made a blog post on the official blog making an important announcement. Quote posts will arrive, but modified for the Mastodon crowd.The post starts off by having to face the hard reality: as much as the Mastodon devs saw quotes as a harassment tool it turns out the userbase of Mastodon saw it differently: they wanted it for their instance but Eugen didn’t deliver. After collecting some of that sweet government money, they’ve decided to implement them to some degree but with Mastodon extensions.Essentially, with Mastodon you will be able to see when posts are quoted (which is something that should work given it does on other platforms), disable the ability for users to quote you, and also be able to withdraw your posts from being quoted. This makes a lot of sense as this is the way Twitter was blowing too especially before the Elon Musk buyout, with reply disabling and tweet hiding. Of course, in that case they backfired with “quote tweets” becoming the new ratio and tweet hiding becoming the “based tweet” button. What, you didn’t think that someone would find ways to use other features to do the same thing you tried to prevent?Anyhow, they’re making a proposal which is a modified version of FEP-e232, which is what the other guys have been implementing. The difference is that Mastodon from what I can tell is going to graft these features on. The real question is, how will they work? Well, I can see one way this can backfire.Let’s just say that software doesn’t respect this, like how MRFs can be made to just ignore post scopes or rewrite them (including even DMs). Or it doesn’t respect it because disabling previous quotes breaks posts, like how “this tweet is unavailable” is a codeword for shadowbanning/censorship on Twitter. At that point, it’s like searching was on Mastodon or DMs are on fedi: a very false sense of security. This is especially true when someone gets around this by just screencapping, and now you have no idea if you were quoted.Personally, I don’t like quotes for the reasons I mentioned, yet it’s the way the wind blew with the fedi. The users disagreed with the devs and so they were forced to eventually add it as other fedi instances began to support it. On Mastodon itself, it’s had divisive reactions.But knowing what happened with Pleroma and the implementation of quote tweets; once the dust settles everyone will end up using it like they did on Twitter. Some instances running forks of Mastodon might have it disabled instance-wide, but those will be just a fraction of the userbase. It was bound to happen especially with the numbers that Mastodon is lacking, and it’ll be interesting to see how the Mastodon sphere handles it…who am I kidding they will get used to it like trending hashtags and search. It’ll just get brought up again in another “I’m leaving Mastodon forever” harassment post and then everyone will forget there was even a debate. In fact, many people are happy for this:After all, that’s how everything with any big social media site happens. An unpopular feature with some pushback from someone is rolled out and the world adapts because the people who use Mastodon aren’t coders, and the people who want feature parity with the big social media networks will want it as well. I’m certain it’s going to get used on Mastodon even more than it is on instances running Soapbox or it’s new fork pl-fe, or Misskey and its forks. In a month, nobody will care, but it’s funny to see the same argument that unfolded in Pleroma’s sphere play itself out again but with a more Twitter-centric userbase.I still remember a post about how “Mastodon Is Crumbling” from 2019 because Eugen did what Eugen wants when it came to hashtag trends, and in this case he has more people at his throat asking him to add quotes than people angry over the idea of quoting. In 2025, the group thinking that having trends and discover feeds and search are bad now consists of a small number of nerds, dwarfed by the people who want “Twitter without Elon Musk”. Bluesky might have more heavy-handed censorship than the fedi as a whole, but it has users, e-celebs, and everyone is on the same site.This is going to be the future direction of Mastodon no matter if you hear radio DJs talking about it or brands making accounts there or not. Of course, Mastodon will always be the IE6 of fedi as it lags behind what Misskey/Pleroma offer (see: reactions), but his competition isn’t a social media network used mostly by Japanese dudes posting food photos or porn artists, or one full of edgy internet racists into anime, or one full of “horny puppygirls” using Linux on old ThinkPads with dated CPUs. It’s Bluesky, the social network that is getting the hype Mastodon got in 2017 turned up to 11. This is why Eugen is having to walk back his words in 2018; because Bluesky has quote posts and Mastodon didn’t. In the end, “Don’t forget, you’re here forever” will apply to Mastodon’s userbase.
       
 (DIR) Post #ArGQ9E4BOIIno4ShGK by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2025-02-19T03:31:43Z
       
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       Mitra: An ideal fedi software for single-user instancesA while back I ran a Pleroma instance on some lowendbox VPS as my main instance, which I then migrated to Soapbox/Rebased. Eventually; something bad happened: The classic “Pleroma DB bloat” issue reared its ugly head and then my VPS provider went out of business. So I just ditched the instance and forgot about it. In 2024, I tried to host wafrn as I thought it’d be cool to host something Tumblr like and I had gotten reposts from them on a less blocked instance, only to find out that the software was really not designed to be self-hosted and was mostly written for the namesake Tumblr clone.Recently some of my fedi mutuals had been talking about this new piece of fedi software called Mitra. Mitra is a brand-new piece of fedi software, written in Rust and designed to be lightweight. With a low CPU and memory footprint, it’s ideal to run on cheap VPSes from LowEndBox or that Core 2 Duo Dell Optiplex lying under your bed. It even does media proxying out of the box!What makes Mitra notable is two things: it’s very lightweight and if you use a Debian-based distro it’s very easy to install. By that I mean, Debian/Ubuntu with systemd (I have no idea how it works on Devuan as it uses a systemctl script). Even better; the setup is very easy. If installing Pleroma takes a while, requires you to make secret keys, and whatnot, installing Mitra simply requires you to wget a deb file, install it with dpkg -I, and create a postgre user. That’s it. Oh, and also the usual “config nginx and get the let’s encrypt key”.There’s also docker images, and a version for alpine linux. I haven’t tested how it works on non-Linux OSes like OpenBSD or illumos, but I’m sure if it gets popular enough someone will try to run it.The Mitra ExperienceWhen you make and login to Mitra for the first time, you’ll be greeted with a UI reminiscent of Twitter/Soapbox. It’s lightweight as well, it’s not bloated, and for a single user instance it works great. Even better, my instance isn’t running slow or hitting resource limits yet. It features the classic fedi things, from TWKN and local timelines, notifications, and bookmarks.For a single user instance, it’s probably the best instance software I’ve used simply because it’s light and doesn’t have much in the way of bloat or weirdness. Though, there are a few cons I’d like to point out as well as Mitra I wouldn’t run on a multi-user instance for one main reason: The moderation tools are inadequate.Minimal moderation toolsFor running a multi-user instance, there’s lots of tools that Pleroma has (along with other pieces of software like Misskey and Mastodon) that Mitra currently lacks. On Pleroma, administration is done with what’s called AdminFE. AdminFE is similar to “management” portals on say forum software, such as the Admin Control Panel on Xenforo. You can change all the settings without the command line, along with taking care of important moderation tasks. Pleroma also lets you defederate users, remove posts with illegal content, and more all from the main frontend.On Mitra, you cannot do any of this from the frontend. You need to use the federation filters and the mitra-ctl command from the command line on the server itself. It’s not fine-grained like Pleroma is when it comes to management. You can’t say, force spoilers on images from specific instances that post untagged porn for instance.There’s also no ability to hide timelines for logged-in users, which will be a liability if your instance gets huge and you start getting e-mails from people about a user on another instance.Essentially; while Mitra is small and lean, the critical issue is that the moderation abilities just aren’t there yet. Now Mitra is a younger piece of fedi software, only being in development for 4 years and having only 38 instances using it and 367 users overall. Possibly due to the moderation issues, it also only has 34 users on the largest instance running it. I also went to an instance where there were sign ups, and there were no captchas! In early 2024, a huge spam attack hit fedi exploiting this very thing. So, if Mitra wants to be viable for larger instances, it has a long way to go honestly.Still; it has potentialAs of now (Feb 2025), Mitra is probably one of the best things to run a single user instance on simply because it’s lightweight. But if it wants to grow and compete with even Pleroma, it needs to add moderation tools that Pleroma and the like are known for having. I’d recommend running it for a single user instance for sure, and the ease of installation is second-to-none. Yet, I feel it has a long way to go before it’ll be a bigger player on the fedi.
       
 (DIR) Post #Atm2ZRsA38gtnqCIgC by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2025-05-05T05:22:40Z
       
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       The biggest problem with Nu-CoD: The death of the lobbyOne of the most controversial aspects of Microsoft’s strategy with the Xbox platform is Game Pass. Game Pass is a subscription service for the PC or Xbox that allows you to play or stream games. It’s been Microsoft’s big gamble and something that Sony has kind of bungled trying to mimic Microsoft. Microsoft buying Activision, Bethesda, and other studios was part of a “long game” plan to make modern gaming a lot like Netflix. Nevermind the fact that streaming in itself is questionable when it comes to being sustainable, in the sense that as rights run out shows vanish or get used for tax write offs. The goal is for a flat fee of $20 a month, you can play any game you want in the program.Think of it like PS Plus or Games with Gold taken to the logical extreme. Games with Gold allowed you to get two games a month that stay in your library forever (360) or as long as you pay the monthly fee (One/Series). Then Game Pass came out, and the format of this is completely different: for a flat fee you can pick from the 400+ games in the library. These aren’t slop titles nobody wants though, there’s pretty much tons of big-name games from both publishers/devs who signed on, along with Ubisoft/EA having their own passes included in the fee. It’s so popular that Sony did the same thing with PS Plus, yet unlike Game Pass you can’t get access to new Ubisoft/EA games. Developers are compensated in different ways, from paying up front to have the game included to revenue sharing per downloads. Of course, there’s also free marketing from people picking up the game and trying it, and games being rotated out so you have to buy the game at a discount if you like it.One of the biggest things to happen to Game Pass is Call of Duty making a visit on it. See; Microsoft buying Activision might as well have been for this one reason alone. Call of Duty is the gaming version of a crappy drug everyone is hooked on, but absolutely hates. Instead of having to buy the new CoD yearly; you too can play Black Ops 6 or whatever they’re at now on Game Pass. So, I decided to try playing MWIII and MWII on the Game Pass service on the PC after buying a month of it (since it includes XBL gold as well), and well, there’s a lot that can be said about modern CoD.MWII/III isn’t a bad game…Essentially if I were to describe MWII/III (the same game really, I’m not even bothering with BO6), it’s a pretty interesting game as it is. It’s a bit distant from how the “golden-age” of CoD played (4 to BO2), yet it’s a very well-polished, well optimized game. With the default settings, it runs at a high framerate on my Intel ARC A750, and on the aging Xbox One X hardware it runs pretty well too. Graphically it looks great, moreso if you pay money for an expensive GPU or something. It’s a very polished game IMO, and it plays quite fun when you get into a decent lobby. It might not have the “advanced movement” (jetpacks) that AW or IW/BO3 implemented yet it’s clear they took some notes from that with tactical sprint and sliding. There’s plenty of people on both titles, both with Game Pass and the general malaise of Black Ops 6. Literally, YouTube is recommending me videos of how “bad” it is from someone hate playing it and another guy who is playing XDefiant until the bitter end and talking about how BO6 is just Activision taking a dump on everyone.That’s not to say there’s bad parts about it. There are some maps that are downright tiny and feel painful to play, especially on objective modes like CTF. There was literally a map where both flags were across from each other with a giant open lobby between them, and that was painful to play. The best maps unsurprisingly seem to be the throwback maps ported from CoD4/MW2. Yet, it’s still better than playing WWII or some of the other CoDs with bad map designs and quick kill times.If anything; it feels like the one thing killing MWII/III and modern CoD in general has more to do with Activision and their choices around the franchise. I’m talking bad anti-cheats, voice-chat AI moderation, and of course the whole cosmetics that feel ripped right out of Fortnite. No, I don’t want to play as Nicki Minaj in CoD. There’s also the giant elephant in the room of SBMM, or Skill-Based Matchmaking. This is one of the worst modern CoD features; where behind the scenes players will be “matched” with players based on skill level. This has come under much criticism for matching players in lobbies with frustrating opponents, or matching you against bad players to make you get hooked more so you play even more of the game. This is combined with a second matchmaking feature to match you with players with cosmetics to try to get you to buy them.Much of this has been talked about by angry forum posters and YouTubers, so I’m going to focus on what I personally noticed and probably the fatal flaw with the game: the death of the classic lobby.Lobbies and their deathPrevious Call of Duty games worked in either one of two ways. The PC versions of 1-World at War and Black Ops 1 featured a server list as the only way to play online. This worked like you expected, you would join a server and play until you quit. Communities formed around this, leading to much disdain when this was killed with the original Modern Warfare 2. This would lead to years of CoD client mods combined to a series of C&Ds from Activision leading to Plutonium (the alternate server for WaW/BO1/MW3/BO2) requiring a Steam account check to allow you to play on their servers online.The second format used for Call of Duty online modes was the matchmaking lobby. For the longest time, CoD used a matchmaking system where you’d be dumped into a lobby. One of the players would host the game but not be told this (with the exception of say AW on the PS3 with serious framerate drops for the hoster), and all the other players would be clients. After each round, the lobby would stay together until the next game. This was a critical part of what made CoD organically successful, as older console multiplayer games were about socialization. You could stay and shoot the shit with other players in between lobbies, become friends with them, and add them/join their party to stick around after the match. This wasn’t solely a CoD thing, as Halo 3/Reach used other techniques to have the same process occur with its “no joining in progress” matchmaking: you could “party up” after each round in Halo 3. In fact; Halo 3 was arguably even better at socialization because the party leader could back out and run custom games, change the playlist, or even do Halo co-op campaign runs.Sure, people like to talk about moments that could never happen in a post-Tumblr world without half the lobby being muted, like the Riot Shield argument video and numerous other “Xbox Live Kid” moments:https://youtu.be/vn-shXySml0But what people don’t talk about are all the organic moments that could only happen back in this day of matchmaking, from getting invites from other players in your recent player list, to meeting friends online.In new Call of Duty titles (and the Halo MCC as another example); this is absent. Instead, after each lobby you are thrown out into the main menu to search for another game with entirely different people. Back in the day you could do the same doing this thing called “backing out”. This was done to introduce and push a new feature: playlists in CoD went out the window in favor of playlist filtering. Others have speculated this is due to the previously mentioned SBMM being unable to work as well if players don’t leave a lobby after each round so it can throw you into a lobby that’s predetermined by the magic black box algorithm. There’s also the recent players list not actually working right, so you can’t find that funny player you wanted to vibe with some more or the person who was playing very well with map callouts and all. Instead, you get random lobbies which are a crapshoot if you get cool people. You’ll get silent lobbies (because the lobby got AI voice chat banned), or someone with their mic picking up game audio, yelling at the other team, and smoke alarm chirps.This new method of matchmaking gives the game a very “dead” feel; almost as if something is missing. Eventually it clicked on what that something was: lobbies are dead. These are the new CoDs and people are clearly using their mics, but yet you can’t see this anymore due to how matchmaking works. It’s made playing these games much less fun and social, and I no longer can find new friends on these games.Friendslop and a sign of the timesQuite frankly, I should be playing different games, ranging from that “hot multiplayer” people are shilling to flavor of the month games. Yet; the sterile multiplayer experience of new CoD games is a reminder of just how things have changed in the post-Tumblr world of online gaming. You can’t even play the same game online and get the same experience you used to. It’s not like you can playing the old CoDs; their popularity and dated/exploitable engine (the BO2 Theater Mode exploit being the absolute most notorious of them all, along with PC CoD’s RCEs) made them a prime target for hackers.But I mean; do you think AI voice chat censorship was a thing in old-school CoD, let alone the pride emblems or the infamous BLM message in CoD during the “summer of love?”The problem is, you can only slide dodge the rot in new video games so long before it catches up with you. The game you used to play as an escape from the real world has been rotted to the core. Sure, few people use the pride flag emblems in CoD, but you will see lots of voice banned people in every lobby. It’s going to be hard going back to the late 2000s/early 2010s, when culture and the quality of the games has taken a nosedive. I can see why people avoid this series now; there’s something to piss off everyone in new CoD.I guess I did this to get a taste of just how bad things are in new video games, and this experiment has served its purpose. Yet; what keeps this series alive isn’t that it’s good, but because of your normie friends and coworkers. You begrudgingly play this or “friendslop” flavor of the month games like REPO because your friends play it too and they’re bugging you nonstop to please play this, while refusing to play anything you want.Arguably, Call of Duty when it began to decline (I’d say the original MW3 was this point for many before the total mess of Ghosts) was an early example of this. They weren’t playing it because it was good, but because their friends did. People saw the original MW3 the same way they do the new one: as a MW2 expansion pack. It wasn’t that good, and yet people played it because their friends were too. Then BO2 came out in 2012 and MW3 was just an anomaly. Boy, if we all knew what was to come afterwards!This is what Call of Duty is now: It’s chasing the dragon of the past eternally down to having remakes of old maps and milking the crap out of Nuketown. It’s fighting game design choices that Activision staff probably mandated. If “friendslop” games are what your Discord or online group plays for the sake of it and only this week while blowing you off for the 20th time today (just like how you’re their 30th side hoe), CoD is what your normie coworkers play after another long day at a dead-end job dealing with whatever drama comes up. They’ll never release sales numbers or player count numbers anymore (especially with Game Pass), but they’ll tell you they’re selling well, we promise, we swear.It might feel dead and sterile, kept afloat by the sheer power of missed Nissan Altima payments by paypigs willing to spend $100 for the special edition or Game Pass consoomers. That’s not going into the fact that player retention thanks to SBMM and updates is all fake; it dies when the publisher says so. Why have mods or custom maps when you can buy a new game yearly with an unsustainable business model?I guess my point here is; if an online game wants to be good it’s gotta be better than CoD, but who am I kidding? Everything with a centralized server list/system might as well be Nu-CoD now (especially in a world of gamedevs who only use Bluesky and goon to the idea of “owning the chuds” for a few reposts and blog articles), except for a game where you control your own server list. Be it UT99 servers with boobs for the load screens, or games with servers like this:Essentially, the only way forward is to kill matchmaking and return to servers. 
       
 (DIR) Post #Ato163zc2mfRhm1j60 by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2025-05-06T04:15:40Z
       
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       Why old games never die (but new ones do)It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties. Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.Many new games come and go, and oftentimes nowadays the servers are pulled leaving the games unplayable or crippled. Most notably, this has led to a “stop killing games” campaign in the EU and other countries; where people get tired of buying games only for them to be unplayable when the developer yanks the servers leaving no way to play this game anymore.Yet, old games seem to last forever. Case in point: Epic’s other game. Epic Games these days is best known for Fortnite and the controversial (due to bloat) Unreal Engine 5. But in the late 90s and 00s, they were known for another game franchise: Unreal Tournament. Unreal Tournament was a huge game at the time, yet it’s been pulled off stores, had the original master list shutdown, and abandoned so hard that Epic literally told a fansite who they entrusted the source code with that “yeah you can make a downloader for UT, just don’t host the files and download them from IA“. Epic would even link the game download from the official site giving it an unofficial nod of approval. The end result? Far more people are playing UT99 than in the past as you just need to download it there and play it.An even more dramatic example is Counter-Strike 1.6. Despite two major sequels that people cared about (Source and GO/2) and the latter being a F2P game with a thriving market that’s become somewhat of a meme (with gambling/crate opening sites and all linked to it), 1.6 still has a huge, thriving community. Every day, it still has around 10k players a day playing a FPS from the early 2000s (and this isn’t counting cracked copies for a game that’s $10 on Steam, boosting the number higher). While FPSes branded as “boomer shooters” (along with genres from that time like immersive sims, movement shooters, etc.) might come and go in vogue especially with indie devs, CS 1.6 has never died period. It will be played until the heat death of the universe.There are many reasons these old games never die, and I’m going to explain why.They work on literally anythingBack in the 80s and 90s with home computers (C64, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, PC-8801, MSX, etc.) and other proprietary computers that were handled in a similar way (Macs, PC-98s, etc.), there was one thing you had to do to make sure that anyone and everyone could run your game. You had to make sure it would run on the biggest shitbox around or the “base specs” of said computer line. I’m talking stuff like the normal C64 and not the C128, the Amiga 500 and other OCS models (and not the AGA-based 1200), the PC-8801mkIISR, the PC-9801VM, etc.Sure, you could have your game take advantage of the better hardware if it existed, but much of your audience was going to be some broke nerd or kid who had only the crummiest model and parents telling him “We already have this at home”. Eventually, the PC clone market would dominate these computers with the power of sheer brute force. The PC might not have a custom chipset tightly bound to the hardware like with the Amiga, but if you slapped in a motherboard with a fast CPU and a fast VGA card, you could do some really cool stuff on the PC. Eventually the rise of DOOM and later Quake would really stand out as “killer apps” on the PC as other computers just couldn’t handle these new games (or didn’t have them ported).When the 2000s rolled around, several things happened. The first is that more and more new cutting-edge games required you to buy a better GPU. The second thing is more interesting; PCs became cheaper and cheaper and the home computer would be replaced with a low-end PC in the role of “cheap home computer for the masses”. A Dell catalog shows this very well, in 2003 for less than the price of an Amiga 500 “back in the day” you could get a Dell Dimension 2400 with a P4 based Celeron, onboard Intel Graphics, 128MB of RAM, and a 40GB 5400RPM HDD. For a small extra fee you could even get a monitor with it, but my parents didn’t when they ordered theirs to save a buck and reuse their old monitor. I think a lot of people in the USA grew up with these infamous black and grey Dell computers, like how the previous generation grew up with home computers.The problem is, the Intel GPU was comically bad and probably as fast as an ATI Rage or something. It wasn’t designed for doing anything aside from the most basic of basic 3d, word processing, and e-mail. Naturally, this meant that only two kinds of games would run on it. The first were casual games designed for low-end GPUs to begin with, as the developers knew their audience didn’t want to buy a new GPU to play some PopCap game, a CSI TV show tie-in game, or The Sims/SimCity. While The Sims 2 required a GPU with hardware T&L, many people were probably content playing it on Intel graphics back in the day at 15-20fps:Of course, if you wanted to run 3d games, you could install more RAM and buy a PCI GPU (and only a PCI GPU, the 2400 lacked AGP!). But there were many people who as kids, played games on this exact hardware. Many 2000 era games were still playable on these GPUs, from Deus Ex to RTCW to UT99, especially if you turned down the resolution option. I still remember how bummed out I was getting Lego Star Wars only to get an error about how it needed Pixel Shaders…With modern integrated GPUs being vastly more powerful than the crummy Intel Extreme Graphics of the 2000s, they might not be good enough to run new AAA games like the latest Call of Duty but they can easily run older games just perfectly fine. Older games were made to push some GeForce FX 5800 GPU or similar ATI GPU of the era; now the onboard laptop GPU in whatever the cheap Wal-Mart special is can destroy it in performance for every game. Even a mid-range $100 GPU from 2009 can get beaten by an Intel laptop GPU from 5 years ago in 3DMark Vantage! You can even run DOOM 3 just fine on an Oculus Quest VR headset, and when that game was new it needed a high-end GPU. So naturally, old games will continue to be viable due to the fact that cheap hardware still will be unable to run the latest games with the exception of indie games and well-optimized games written for low-spec PCs deliberately.With high GPU prices, tariff scares all the time, and PC hardware inevitably going to rise in cost for any excuse possible, high-end PC gaming might as well be in the realm of rich whales who can afford all those parts. It’s even worse in poorer countries or sanctioned countries, where even if you can buy the hardware good luck making the money to afford it without a sugar daddy when your hilariously devalued currency’s minimum wage is per day, and when using a package forwarder is cheaper than looking on your local marketplace site.So naturally, old games are going to stay around because CS 1.6 for example can run on literally anything with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. But that’s not the only reason these old games stay around…Server Hosting and LAN play (you control the game)One of the reasons that games like Minecraft, CS 1.6, or UT99 have stayed around for so long has to do with the ability to host your own server. This is a freedom that was stripped away when PC games began to use matchmaking lobbies. Now you can probably already guess why this happened, and much of it has to do with piracy. Game developers stripped out LAN support and server hosting because in the late-2000s, PC game devs were scared about piracy. A post from FourZeroTwo at Infinity Ward lamented this, by talking about how there were “disturbing” numbers of people who didn’t pay for the game. The “fix” was to force matchmaking on MW2 PC. While this led to protests and mods for these games that allowed custom server hosting, these were frequently shut down by Activision due to…you guessed it, piracy! The latest shutdown of xlabs (which was speculated to be a mix of offering download links to games and having a Patreon for the licensing dumpster fire of the BOIII client) led directly to a different group making CoD clients to require a Steam account check to ensure you bought the game.Yet, the fact that there are these mods is a testament to exactly what PC gamers lost. PC gamers had the ability to run their own servers and their own community, with their own rules taken away. With custom servers, you are not beholden to the whims of whatever the game publishers and devs want. You can load your own mods, you can host lobbies with your own custom game rules and moderation, and of course you can ban that guy using an aimbot that managed to get past the anti-cheat (if it exists). Or in the case of UT99, you can even custom load your own anti-cheat.Another happy side effect of games having basic server lists comes down to the fact that if they go down, you can easily host just the server list and not have to reverse engineer the backend architecture of the game. This already happened notably with the great GameSpy shutdown, in which mountains of games lost online connectivity due to GameSpy being bought out and the new owners pulling the plug. This meant that you only had to modify the exe or an ini file to allow the game to connect to a new list, such as OpenSpy.LAN play is another fallback as well; and this notably was what the Original Xbox community used from the time period ranging from the shutdown of the Original Xbox servers, to Insignia popping up. In fact; there are many games that still don’t work on Insignia (or which never had online, like Halo 1) that can still be played on Xlink Kai due to the LAN mode existing. This was also used on the PC for many shutdown or pirated games, and stuff like GameRanger or Tunngle is popular for this purpose. Of course; this also had to go due to piracy, and many people who wanted to play games at LAN parties were not happy about this.Some developers like EA had compromises: you could pay to rent a server for Battlefield games until Battlefield V. You can’t have access to the game files of course and it’s all done through providers they approve or directly from the game menus (with consoles), but you can still play these games online with player hosted servers with communities they form and their own rules. This is why Battlefield stayed relevant on the PC for longer than CoD did. Yet as Black Ops 1 on the PC showed, this only lasts as long as server hosting companies or the publisher let you host it. The second the last person stops paying his GameServers bill, it’s over (unless you download Plutonium).Modding supportAnother thing that has gone out the window is mod support. Most of this has to do with selling DLC packs, while in the case of Battlefield Bad Company 2 this had to do “officially” with the Frostbite engine having horrible quality editors that needed a special setup at EA to use and couldn’t exactly be released to the public without a lot of code cleanup. While this might have been an excuse, stories about Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda by Kotaku both talked about how even within EA, developing for the Frostbite engine was a disaster and going in detail about how much they had to modify the engine just to make the game work.But here’s the thing with mod support: aside from a few developers who are either supportive or passive about it; games usually lack mods these days. I’m not talking about stuff like “some tweak tool to fix a buggy game” or simple graphical swaps, I’m talking about the stuff you’d see with older games like full on total conversions, custom maps, custom game modes, and more. It seems like for any big-name game, this has faded away. For older games, this was the standard. For modern games, you’re lucky to even get modding tools. There are of course some high-profile exceptions, like the PC version of the Halo MCC having Sapien/Guerilla for all of the Halo titles (yet you cannot play these custom levels with the custom game browser), and pretty much any game with Steam Workshop support. Yet, it’s a far cry from what PC gaming used to be like. It’s very common to find a game that used to be big having mod tools; and its sequel having nothing of this sort. STALKER 2 might have tweaks and stuff on ModNexus, but the original STALKER trilogy on the X-Ray engine has tons of total conversions on moddb along with “improved” versions of the engine for modders.Or even Call of Duty. Call of Duty used to have tons of mods up until World at War (thanks to letting gamers use Radiant), and World at War had for the longest time a dedicated custom zombie map scene. The scene isn’t as active as it once was…because Black Ops 3 broke from the “new normal” and also featured a way to make custom MP mods. The results speak for themselves, people still play Black Ops 3 solely because you can get tons of custom zombie maps for it with new ones coming out all the time. As the game acts as a custom zombie map sandbox, Black Ops 3 is the second most played CoD title on Steam, and the largest “standalone” CoD title on Steam (as the largest title is a singular app that combines all the newer CoDs and the F2P Warzone mode into one game).This isn’t taking into account certain developers absolutely hostile towards the modding community, like Nintendo. Nintendo is so notorious that by the late-2010s, it was a common joke that the minute Kotaku covered a mod/romhack of a Nintendo game it would get a C&D from Nintendo the next day, and Twitter replies would call them out for “snitching” or ruining it.Dedicated PlayerbasesThe most important thing that keeps old games alive however, is a dedicated playerbase. Older games were good enough to keep people organically hooked for years, without tricks from the casino playbook like SBMM or FOMO microtransactions. These games built up a community, because they were just damn good. Even as newer games came out; people would continue to play the older ones due to the fact that they were hooked on these games and good at them.This is why a game from the 90s or early 2000s still has players. There are sometimes newer players joining in to see what the buzz is about, but a lot of people on games like CS 1.6 have played them for years and years. In some lobbies, you will likely be destroyed not by some guy who bought the gun from the item shop, but by some guy who has muscle memory when aiming the AWP.Yet, this also happens for other reasons. Servers and mods allowed communities to stick around. A game with 50-100 people online is alive when you can click a server to join, at numbers this low a matchmaking queue will choke because it was coded to work with tens to hundreds of thousands of players online, not 50 people online. Even if it was just “host your own game” like with console games before matchmaking took over completely (such as early XBL games with “quick match” and “optimatch”) or other games with only player hosted lobbies like RTS games, you don’t need to fight the broken matchmaking system to play online.But most importantly, these games were good enough to gain a cult following. Bringing back a dead online game from the grave isn’t a matter of finding some lost media from an eBay listing or some guy who has it on a forgotten external drive or old computer. It’s about having to reverse engineer the code, sometimes with just the client and zero packet dumps. It’s a lot of effort to recreate a game that requires an online server with zero packet dumps that nobody cares about, and it’s why you can’t play something like Battleborn or Lawbreakers online anymore, meanwhile Fortnite has something like EZFN for old Fortnite seasons. The same applies with RuneScape private servers, Phantasy Star Online/Universe, and the longtime existence of private WoW servers designed to bring back the “early days” of that game.Making new games lastIf new games are to last, they need to have quite a few things. The first factor is they should be able to function partially offline. The second and more important factor is, they need to allow players to have control over the game, from having mod SDKs to player-hosted servers. Sites like GameServers and the like offering managed hosting might stop hosting older games, but you can always just get a VPS or something and remotely copy the files needed to your own instance. Or just host in the basement like all my friends used to do back in the day, just be aware that you’ll be opening up your network to getting DDoSed by an angry player. Back in the day; when this culture was more common it wasn’t uncommon to look at an old server and ask yourself if it could host Minecraft.Smaller, niche developers seem to care more about this. Maybe this is because they grew up with these games, maybe it’s because they understand the importance of modding, maybe they started out as modders, maybe it’s all of these. Here’s a good example of this very craze in action. A while back, this game came out called ArmA, and it was a realistic military simulator with a cult niche following. It got rave reviews from PC Gamer and the like due to its milsim focus as opposed to the arcadey action of popular military shooters. Then this survival simulator mod came out and the game completely boomed in player count as people ran to buy the game to play the mod. This mod was called DayZ, and it was so successful in its day that Bohemia Interactive even brought on the developer of it to make a standalone game based on it. There would be yet another mod for this game called DayZ: Battle Royale and it was so popular that it spawned yet another standalone game: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. This game would spawn the popular Battle Royale genre of video games and everyone would rush to copy it.This kind of craze isn’t as likely to happen on newer AAA games with closed off modding tools, and no longer can a person buy a game and like it so much he wants to make his own game on the same engine. You can’t do that with AAA games anymore. Instead you need to be that gamedev guy who can download an engine, as that ladder from modder to gamedev doesn’t exist in the largest games anymore.All a developer has to do is realize what made old games last forever; and maybe he’ll end up the next Notch. After all, Minecraft wasn’t an AAA game, it was literally the biggest indie success story of all time. If Minecraft didn’t have its extensive mod community or player-hosted servers, it probably would have never been successful.The problem is; with few exceptions (Nintendo, Bethesda, etc.) the mainstream video game industry does not want to make games that last. They only want to make mere slop with an expiration date to sell as many copies as possible before it piles up at GameStop for $3 a copy. They don’t care, because they assume you’ll be plopping down an $80 preorder to get next year’s game.To upend the traditional video game industry means that any developer just needs to look to the past to see what made games stick: make them run on anything without a $700 GPU, make them fun, and let the players keep the game going organically. 
       
 (DIR) Post #AuXiihQa3IhXu5y5BI by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2025-05-28T05:26:20Z
       
       1 likes, 2 repeats
       
       When rot is worse than a shutdown: The sad state of PC Call of DutyRecently, a post I made discussing how games like Counter Strike or UT99 still are either playable or have communities went viral. I had many interesting responses to it, and while there were some weird comments many did grasp the point: older games were more moddable and some studios actually care about devs. Maybe I should have put “Multiplayer” in the title because old single-player games literally can never die as long as a single copy exists and is playable/preserved in some way, and there’s a computer out there that can run it (or there’s interest in writing an emulator to do such even if the hardware no longer exists or is rare, as with the Konix Multisystem or 3do m2.) In fact; as translations of games for Japan-only platforms such as the NEC PC-9801 or Bandai Wonderswan have shown, sometimes emulation can unlock a new audience for said games.What also was mentioned was stuff like Stop Killing Games, something I 100% agree with as many AAA games either choose to force part of the game logic online, or have modes locked behind internet connections. While this trend wasn’t new (TGM: Ace needs a XBL Gold account for many modes while PSO on the OG Xbox needed a gamertag to play offline!), it’s ramped up with the rise of “cloud” stuff for online gaming. The Crew is a notorious example, along with NFS 2015, but even Call of Duty Zombies needs online for major functions of maps to function such as locking easter eggs behind a connection and this interesting video I found recently demonstrates this.But what could possible be worse than an online shutdown? What could be worse than a game that requires online connections to play either due to arbitrary restrictions the developers coded in or “cloud” connections? It’s a game that is literally unsafe to play online and I don’t mean that in an exaggerated way either.Call of Duty and a brief history of the technical flawsCall of Duty is a very weird franchise in many ways. It’s what happens when a company who only cares about money hits it big, only for the cracks to show quickly despite its popularity. Call of Duty is a very popular franchise and while part of this has to do with FOMO, the Xbox 360 era (and maybe some of the early next-gen games) held up well in theory.The difference between Call of Duty and other games I mentioned in the last post, is that Activision absolutely hates their fans on a level only surpassed by Nintendo (in the legal department), without the excuse of having a record of making solid games like Nintendo does. The other difference is that Call of Duty is released in a yearly model reserved for sports games; with every year having a new title released. In fact, the exes for newer Call of Duty titles will have names like “cod23” or “cod22” for their exes and folders; literally being the release year. On top of that, the schizophrenic “3 development studio” model (where every year another dev releases their title) and pursuit of money has led to some very bizarre decisions that are inconsistent from game to game. Due to this, the Call of Duty playerbase is fragmented among different games that people like in particular. Some people like the WWII titles, others like something from the “golden age” of 360 titles from CoD4 to BO2, others like some of the Xbox One/PS4 era titles such as AW, Ghosts, and BO3, and others like the newest CoDs made after MW2019 acted as a reboot of the franchise (sometimes nicknamed the SBMM era).While many of the core gameplay elements are there, the gameplay elements have shifted so dramatically between titles (think like Sonic or Need for Speed) that each person has their own individual game they love. In an ideal world, this would not be a problem. In fact for older titles like CoD1, 2, 4, and World at War on the PC, there’s even a server list one can use. Players essentially control that game to some degree, as these titles were PC focused games.In 2009 however, Call of Duty on the PC would suffer a blow it would never recover from. PC Modern Warfare 2 was a straight up console port, with no mods, dedicated servers, LAN play (which was still on consoles), or similar. It was a giant middle finger from Activision to the PC audience, showing they were no longer their audience but rather the Xbox audience was. CoD on the PC would now be a matchmaking-based shooter, relying solely on VAC and maybe reports to get cheaters banned as opposed to the model of servers that worked. There were boycott MW2 campaigns that worked to varying degrees of success, and while people bought it initially over time interest waned. There were projects to replace the Steam matchmaking system in later PC Call of Duty titles with a server list like AlterIWNet, FourDeltaOne, and later IW4x/Xlabs. Every single one of them was shut down except for IW4x, which was designed with redundancy in mind for if this were to happen. Years later, these projects would gain more importance but keep this in mind.Anyhow, back to 2009. Call of Duty MW2 launched and the cracks began to show. See; Call of Duty has this thing where they would reuse code all the time. The engine of CoD (at least for this era) is based on a heavily modified id Tech 3 engine, which CoD1 ran on. Call of Duty 2 and later titles for a while would run on descendants of this engine (to the point of still using Radiant), and even BO6 has the id Software copyright notice.Still; the biggest problem with Call of Duty especially early on is the fact that the engine was not very locked down. The sole layer of security with older Call of Duty titles was if the platforms were secure to begin with. The Xbox 360 would get blown wide open with the JTAG hack of 2009, and the PS3 would follow not long after in 2010. VAC on the other hand was a total joke on the PC and there were bypasses being made and allegedly even ways to get other people VAC banned. Call of Duty’s high profile, lack of security (many “mod menus” were fancy GSC (the CoD engine scripting language) scripts), and desire for anyone to “get good” with cheats led to a period in which every Call of Duty title on every platform was “hacked” to death. It’s not uncommon to join a MW2 lobby in the current year and end up with hackers and mod menus, and don’t get me started on the infamous BO2 theater mode exploit years after launch that would run GSC scripts on unmodified consoles.Activision tried many things to stop the modders on different titles that were new, but left the old ones to be abandoned and overrun with skids. This is maybe because they wanted people to plunk down $60 on BO2 if you wanted your CoD fix but didn’t want to run into xXBluntSmoker420Xx’s Wicked Sick Mod Menu being in use. As these older titles aged, Activision just abandoned them as they continued the eternal war on cheaters on newer titles with better security models. At least in a new CoD title the worst you’ll deal with are aimbotters and similar, which sounds crazy if you didn’t play these titles.So you might be thinking, what’s the worst that can happen from a cheater on 360-era CoD? On a console, the worst that’ll happen is you’ll get “deranked” and find yourself unable to play online unless you jump into someone’s mod lobby or something to fix your rank (sometimes people have reported having corrupted files that cause an instant crash on Steam). The second worst thing that’ll happen is that your console can get frozen up and you have to reset it, and the third is that some kid will DDoS your internet connection.On the PC, it’s so much worse it’s unreal.RCE Exploits in your games? It’s more likely than you thinkWhen Activision switched over to a mix of Demonware and Steam for Call of Duty’s network backend on PC, they had no idea of the can of worms they were opening at this point. There were the usual console exploits like mod menus mixed with VAC disablers and whatnot, but the worst was yet to come. In the late 2010s, people began to report having malware installed on their PC from playing Call of Duty titles. This wasn’t just some stuff that a CoD player was saying because he was mad online, oh no this was very much real. There are multipledifferentCVE entries from this period relating to Call of Duty. One of these would be documented by Call of Duty mod developer momo5502 and others, and by the time he wrote about it this exploit was floating around the CoD modder community for a while. This exploit used crafted packets in particular, while another exploited Steam’s auth and another exploits party joining commands. There are more exploits that haven’t had CVEs or only had patches for them, like one for MW3 and the MemberJoin call.Now I’m no programmer or professional pentester, so I’m not going to talk about the nitty gritty that’s already out there since at least the PoC for one now-patched exploit is on the open internet and it’s safe to assume that other exploits use variants of this. But the crazy part is, all the code reuse bit them as it wasn’t just an exploit for one game but literally years’ worth of titles. There are recent reports on Steam forums of people getting malware dropped while playing Call of Duty titles on the PC version. In fact, this was talked about all the way back in 2018 (after at least one of the exploits was released) with a viral Reddit post by one such person having a RAT planted on his PC thanks to packets targeted towards him. But if this sounds like a “fake” story; this has happened to top streamers playing the game to the point YouTube videos would come out about this scare.It got to the point where in 2023 Activision had to make an emergency patch after PC players were getting exploited en masse on Modern Warfare 2 thanks to a worm targeting the game to the point Kotaku and others picked up the story. A Steam user even discovered strings relating to modded lobbies in the malware itself.Essentially; Steam-era Call of Duty titles are vulnerable to some serious exploits that allow your PC to get hacked by someone who wants to take control of your PC and in one dramatic example, a self-spreading worm. Usually this targets streamers, big players, or anyone who makes a skid feel angry online. The exploits are real, and while it’s debatable on if the stream video is kayfabe for clicks or not, the point is Steam-era Call of Duty titles are not safe to play online on the PC in their unmodded form.Mods to the rescue?Call of Duty is a game that after its sell-by date passes, gets left to rot by Activision. The servers stay up, but playing the game becomes a gambling session. Playing the game online now might get you into a good match, or you’ll get into a match with some kid trying to render a 15-year-old game unplayable because he’s having a bad day or wants to cause chaos. I mean, the entire TF2 cathook fiasco that took forever for Valve to finally stomp out after dragging on for literal years with numerous “save this game” campaigns was a good example of this. Activision could care less, which has led to community members taking matters into their own hands.Black Ops 3, probably the most popular title in the franchise on Steam for now, has a third-party fix for it. With t7patch, RCE bugs are patched and you can even put a password on your game or make it friends only to reduce the attack surface, and 2.04 even reduces it further by disabling Steam Workshop support (meaning that you have to subscribe to mods first, avoiding possibly malicious mods from being downloaded).The situation is much more mixed for older titles. There are two major modding groups for older Call of Duty titles, AlterWare and Plutonium. Plutonium is the most successful of these, covering Black Ops 1, 2, MW3, and World at War (for when the servers go down for that like they did a while back). AlterWare (covering AW, MW2, and Ghosts) is much less popular due to some players moving back to the hacked dumpster fire of vanilla MW2 (thanks to the Xlabs shutdown) and the relative unpopularity of Ghosts and AW (it’s a shame because AW is really fun…and I’d love to not play on a P2P connection from Venezuela (and I’m not joking) on the PS3). Both of these are probably the best way to play older Call of Duty titles on the PC not only due to the RCE exploits, but also due to the fact that they run with a server list model. In fact, Plutonium has more people than the Steam versions do right now, and it’s the only way to play BO1 online once the server payments end for the few remaining servers on GameServers!There are two major problems with this. The first is that due to how these mods work, the playerbase is rather split between people playing the Steam versions, and the mods with server lists. The second problem is that these mods have had a shaky legal history.A few years back, Activision shutdown one of the modding groups, Xlabs, with legal action. There are different people who had different theories for why this happened but the big theories at the time were:XLabs was literally linking to pirated game torrents.The devs were Patreon-walling a BO3 PC client, which to add insult to injury wasn’t even GPL licensed but worse: a “proprietary” license.Modding BO3 on the PC is also a touchy topic given that BO3 on the PC is the only CoD title made after CoD WaW to allow for full player control of the game, and the servers are still up. The motivation for modding the other PC titles had to do mostly with wanting dedicated servers and mods.XLabs was not verifying that anyone using their patch and servers legally owned the game.This led to several major events. AlterWare would pick up the mantle from XLabs, but due to the panic over XLabs and its shutdown the player count for IW4x decreased even with the fallbacks that allowed it to survive the shutdown. Meanwhile AW and Ghosts were unpopular on the PC as it was so this acted as a killing blow to those two games on the PC. Unlike XLabs, AlterWare does not link to pirated games and instead instructs you how to install the mod side by side with your Steam install. The bigger thing is that Plutonium would force you to link a Steam account to play online that showed you owned those games. This seems to have worked because neither project has been shutdown yet (and to be fair nobody cares about AW or Ghosts on PC, unfortunately).The fear seems to have subsided for now about Activision shutting down these modders as they seem to be focused more on suing cheat developers and trying to get people to play Black Ops 6. Furthermore, what led up to the bnetd lawsuit and controversy over that was the inability to verify that anyone using their software owned the games as the CD Key was the copy protection measure of the time. By making sure that anyone on Plutonium owns Black Ops 2, this solves this problem and this has likely led Plutonium to stay active. If these servers would go down, it would be a massive loss for anyone trying to play this game online today.It’s also why it’s unlikely you will see similar mods for SBMM-era Call of Duty titles for a good period of time, because most of the legal action against private servers took place when these games were still at their peak. Trying to make a mod to play any SBMM-era Call of Duty title online with servers instead of SBMM is just as legally risky as making AlterIWNet was when MW2 was still popular. Maybe in a few long years you might see these, but by then will anyone care? I don’t think people will be as nostalgic for MWII as they were for MW2.It’s why user control of online games is importantThe patches for these titles are not because of Activision, but rather despite them. Activision has left these titles out on a vine to die and they could care less. In fact, the saddest long-running joke about how Activision simply couldn’t care less is that the digital prices for old Call of Duty titles are still $60. Black Ops 2 in particular is still $60, along with later titles like Ghosts, AW, Infinite Warfare, and more. They could care less about lowering the price on a 2012 game that is so old that we’re living in the year it takes place in (2025!)This game has serious exploits that remain unpatched unless something so blatant and drastic like “malware that self-spreads” is written for it. Even the theater mode exploit remained unpatched for a while. Activision just doesn’t care, but if this were an older game you could imagine how there’d be a community patch already and a serverside patch too by now. Yet because the control of the player was removed, these exploits are only fixed with a third-party patcher or an entire infrastructure designed for the sole purpose of escaping the closed system.The point is; user control of online games isn’t just important because of shutdowns or matchmaking chugging because of a low player count. It’s because there are things a lot worse than shutdowns, like having your computer exploited by malware.
       
 (DIR) Post #AvfwrJL3TvS7P1JNy4 by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2025-07-01T02:34:50Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Fun with the Minolta Fantasy Card and a Maxxum 9xiIn the late 80s-early 90s, Minolta was chasing the dragon of their high from the mid-80s when they released the famous Maxxum 7000, the first autofocus SLR that actually pulled it off. Using the motor in the body and a brand new mount, Minolta beat the competition by a few months to a year with a midrange, prosumer SLR that could “focus itself”. Unlike previous experiments like the Nikon F3AF or similar, it actually sold well and became the main SLR Minolta would be known for to many who didn’t stick with that system. While Minolta made solid cameras in the decades ahead until the 5d/7d and Sony acquiring the DSLR line and mount, they would never gain the attention of the 7000. Even a website dedicated to the 7000 mentioned that Minolta never really was able to capitalize on their early success, yet there were people who still stuck with the Minolta system over time.The Minolta Maxxum 9xi is one such camera from this era. Minolta wasn’t making bad cameras and anyone who owns one knows this, the problem with Minolta is that more pros for a variety of reasons were buying the higher-end Nikons and Canons of the era. Nikon had the advantage of the legacy lens mount, Canon had the quiet AF system that apparently functions better on massive lenses than Nikon and Minolta, to the point that they would adopt them later. While Nikon did earlier on, Minolta waited until the late-90s to introduce SSM with the Maxxum 7, and to get this on the 9 you had to pay money for conversions. Anyone with an older Minolta body was left in the cold, and to add insult to injury SSM lenses didn’t come out en masse until Sony took over the mount and KM had stopped upgrading 9 bodies. Still; despite this issue the 9xi is a very overlooked film body featuring 1/12000 shutter speeds even!It’s a solid camera, offering multiple AF points that the body auto selects (not even the F5 can do this), program shifting, bracketing, multiple exposures, and more. The UI is a bit weird, especially as it requires you to map the “quick button” to another function, but the body has a clean, stripped-down appearance that looks futuristic for its time.But one of the weird features Minolta implemented was the “Creative Expansion Card” system. Most of the cards consisted of features that could be added to specific models, specific “program” modes that the camera didn’t have in its PASM settings, and whatnot. Most of the cards were gimmicky upgrades that would be implemented in other cameras as a “mode” you could select, and you could program shift to get many of these effects if you knew what you were doing. Some of these cards offered the ability to program the camera to shoot a series of time lapse images for example, while another allowed you to shoot multiple exposures without using the “quick button”, another was multi-spot functionality, another logs rolls you shoot on each camera, and most notably a custom function card that would allow you to reprogram camera settings like turning on and off grip sensor activation, leader out, the default settings, etc. And then there was the weird “Fantasy Card”.The Minolta Fantasy Card is a weird card. It’s not like the other cards that expand functionality, or give you features that one could achieve by fiddling around with the settings. It’s a card that contains one of two programs that activate depending on the light: one of them turns the camera focus motor as it’s engaged for a “zoom” effect at the expense of sharpness, one of them will do a double exposure with a second one being way out of focus for a “soft” or “bright” effect on the image. You can tell which one is going to trigger based on the shutter speed indicator. The problem obviously is, you need slow film and a slow lens to properly use this as otherwise the camera will flash “HI” and it will refuse to expose the film. When you push the camera into its comfort zone, the pictures you get can look very distinct. It won’t make a mediocre picture better, but it’ll make a good picture “pop”. Try it with a Macro lens for a lot of fun. As there aren’t many “example” photos online, I might as well share some from two rolls. 
       
 (DIR) Post #Axqt606T463kJY6lJQ by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2025-09-04T04:58:36Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Revisiting the federated art site proposalIn 2023, when I was still a bit more energetic, I made a post on how there needs to be a federated art site at some point in the future. Fixing the art site issue has always been an issue of mine since around 2020-21 or so, when DeviantArt went down the gutter with “Eclipse” and Twitter was really rotting itself to the core. In this post, I discussed the social media landscape, the fall of DeviantArt, the problem with using social media sites as art sites, and most importantly why you can’t win when starting a monolithic art site. I then propose an alternative to trying to start yet another art site: start a federated art site instead. It’s been nearly 2 years since then, with social media being overrun with AI slop, fake artists scamming people (speedrunning the furry artist grindset by just not drawing to begin with), and social media being a mixed bag.But that was just part one, a simple proposal on why there needs to be a federated art site, why alternatives to DeviantArt failed, and more importantly lamenting the state of social media. In some ways not much has changed, yet I’ve also learned quite a bit about what communities need to survive and more importantly, what sites need to run.It’s too hard to start a normal site…In the current year, it’s very hard to start a normal art site and this hasn’t changed from last time. You’ve got a lot of variables to deal with, from payment processors and ad networks dictating what you can and can’t do (if you don’t want to monetize it with alternative methods, like how AO3 uses donations in a foundation or FA’s selling ad space directly on the site), to users feeling weird because you let users upload something and threatening to leave the site. Then when you remove said art, people think that other art might be next because as FurAffinity has shown (especially after Dragoneer died from poor health), they can and will ban entire groups of art because they feel a certain way today. Or state laws about pornography as a Band-Aid fix for social decline that require you to verify user IDs with different methods (some of which can be outsourced to Persona, some of which have to be done by you which as the Ashley Madison or Tea leaks showed, is a BAD IDEA). Or foreign governments wanting you to work with them in counter-terrorism operations and give them a backdoor to get user information, and you having to go with it because they’re a Five Eyes country. Or the great OFCOM dumpster fire.Even if you say all the right things, do all the right things, pander to the right audience, you’ll still find yourself out of money if you have no business model to cover the hosting costs. This is exactly what happened with Cohost. Cohost was closed source and it made the entire plan for the site revolving around the value of everyone being on the same site. Let’s see how it worked for them.Oh right. It’s dead. It’s a dead, forgotten site, that is literally just a forgotten memory, that people wish would come back but it isn’t coming back, is it?The magic of the fediverse on the other hand comes from the fact it’s decentralized. Unlike Bluesky it’s completely decentralized, and by that I mean it acts exactly like e-mail does, but with a Twitter-like social media format. All you need are two servers in the world running ActivityPub compatible software and you can have a federated network going. Think of it like Hotline or a dead multiplayer game like PC CoD4 using a server list. Nobody might be on tonight, but the servers are up and I can get my friends to play it. I can also still connect to a hotline server and download files in this day and age.The important featuresFrom time to time while daywalking, sometimes I’ll have thoughts about this idea. What I have come to conclude is simple. What art sites like this need to succeed are important features that art sites of the past and present had. What made DeviantArt, Flickr, and other image gallery/art sites so big is that they were all-in-one social media/community sites, all focusing around a theme. Sure, when you think of image gallery sites you might think of basic stuff like high-res images, multiple images on a post (can you believe FurAffinity struggles with both in 2025!), and UI. But what made these sites magic is the community aspect of them. The community aspect of these sites was reinforced by many features.GroupsGroups probably are the most important feature on DeviantArt and Flickr, and both of these sites have them. Yet they are also one of the most important discovery tools on both platforms. I’ll use a very real example of this right now.So today I was explaining this idea to someone on Mumble. To prove a point about groups, I linked a Sigma SD1 group on Flickr and talked about how it has discussions, members, and a photo pool. His mind instantly went to the Photo Pool, as he kept getting fixated on and sharing with the chat the best Sigma SD1 images in the group. Or let’s just say I found an image I liked…well it’s going to be in a bunch of groups with related images.This is exactly what DeviantArt did as well, and if you look at any image before Eclipse you’d get a DOUBLE DOSE of related art….and also groups. See; you could submit images to groups and they would show up in the group gallery and on the post.This is on top of more from the artist, and more from collections.Groups on the site were very elaborate, allowing one to put affiliated groups with more art you’d like, featured art, and galleries of submissions, just like flickr but with art nerds. Essentially, this was the ultimate discovery mechanism.Tags, browsing, and searchingThe other thing that really sets art sites apart from social media sites is the tagging system. DeviantArt offered three systems to find art and start your journey into artistic inspiration: tags, browsing and searching. Tags allowed you to mark what your image was, but what made DeviantArt great on top of that was the category system. DeviantArt browsing worked because you could click one category, and get more. DeviantArt tried to encompass every single artistic style in categories, and it worked because it was an art site and we weren’t treating the internet like a fight club yet.There was also the Daily Deviation category, the “best of the site” results as selected by staff. That’s still up to this day even as they butchered the UI/UX of the site and the old one used to have comments from staff on it.Most importantly, the search function actually worked. This seems silly, but with FurAffinity’s searching function that requires you to use drop-downs to find art (before they broke that LOL) mixed with Mastodon’s former mindset of “search is a harassment tool” and Google breaking search over time, it seems like a miracle to now have a search engine that works. Of course in a federated environment, search only can find “posts the instance knows about”, hence it can only work if the entire userbase is on a monolithic instance without it being centralized like on Bluesky.Other smaller social featuresDeviantArt as it was functioned as a light social media site instead of just an art gallery. There was a watcher function, favorites, webcam (which was used to put random images usually by users), and a journal entry section that either had two things: announcements on artistic endeavors or commissions, or some of the funniest “ohmygodDEWD I’m so depressed I’m gonna fuckin dewd” posting the internet has ever seen. Oh, and most importantly there were comments. There’s no fear that posting a comment will get you banned like there is on e621 or the chat of a failed Twitch streamer.Flickr also has a nice feature to grab exif data from images you upload and display them. Of course, being able to enable or disable that could mitigate a security risk, given how much of a dumpster fire 4chan was with old unpatched libraries pre-hack.The community makes the siteYet the most important ingredient for the success of a website is for it to have a community of some sort. In this day and age, you need to have a community for any site to survive.DeviantArt was so successful in its peak because the site had a community. As the site bled users from Eclipse, poor moderation, and AI slop, the site is a husk of what it once was. Twitter is still loaded with users as even though furries fragmented over to Bluesky, so many more people (especially with money) use Twitter, and that’s why Twitter continues to be around despite drama. Meanwhile users have struggled to use Bluesky because the community there is so toxic and abrasive to the point where even saying the name Bluesky can be the “joke and the punchline”.It’s also why Discord is also so successful even with as trashy as its powerusers are, because Discord has transcended being a mere chat app into being a centralized place not only for discussion online, but also where “things happen”. In fact, Discord literally just took the idea of Slack and adapted it to a normie friendly format targeting gamers. It has now gone on to replace IRC channels and even forums, and people use it because everyone else is there. It’s also why the porn ban killed Tumblr: because the userbase packed up and left when the ban happened.Anyone linking their site into the fediverse has a community/audience automatically. This method of expansion was used by Mastodon with StatusNet (before AP replaced it) to instantly have a userbase of thousands upon thousands of users when it launched, and the same was done with Minds.com to give it a shot in the arm. Recently WordPress added AP support so anyone can read blog posts on the fedi.Moving beyond APSo here’s where the post goes from lamenting the past, into the theoretical. How would you implement DeviantArt and its ideas on a federated scale? For a while, I thought about using AP but there’s a huge problem with it: AP is designed for Twitter-like websites, while functioning like e-mail. Right now for example, Misskey galleries don’t federate between instances. I’d have to either extend, or use a different protocol to federate between instances to get all the groups, user profiles, and art galleries to federate over. Hopefully it can be efficient too.I still want to allow for AP follows or something to some degree, because right now there’s a ton of users on ActivityPub I’d like to be able to tap into, and also I don’t want to keep users stuck on one instance. Maybe DID or similar could be a nice idea given how important posting careers are for people, especially internet artists. Of course, it should have moderation tools both due to content illegal in your jurisdiction and bad actors posting illegal content on the network. That, and dealing with the fact that internet artists won’t want to use your site if art they don’t like is on it.Being in control is great as wellAnother positive aspect of making the site federated is that you can run it as a single user instance. This is something done to much success on the fedi, as I can spin up a single user instance, post what I want, and not needing to worry about being jannied. I can literally post whatever art I want and some 400lb moderator isn’t going to take it down because he doesn’t like it. I’m in control, not someone else.But this is great because if I wanted to make an art gallery that’s single user and only for my portfolio with no federation, I could too. Or I could use my instance mainly for photography, and not art, like Flickr is for right now (and that site is in decline).The same goes if I wanted to make an art site about the specific niche of stuff I’m into, and only that, and only artists into that, without worrying about the admins or userbase feeling weird about it.Slowly moving forwardAt the same time, I feel a bit weird. I haven’t done a coding project before, and I’m worried personally if I want to go down this path, or do gamedev and make games. There’s a lot of stuff I want to do, I’m getting older, and I want to make sure I do what I want. I don’t want to be the sole code janny for this in the end either, but I’d be worried about it being compromised. I’m jut not sure if I want to do this for a while, take a hiatus and do gamedev, etc.I know for a fact if this pays off, it could be really good for artistic types in the future. Yet I also want to make a game and do art…at least I could still do art in between this. Choices choices…I need to ponder this after I get a nice long nap.  
       
 (DIR) Post #B0UZNIQvrdmQMpRqCm by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2025-11-22T04:10:12Z
       
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       The Xbox 360 is now 20 years old….On November 22nd, 2005, the last big upgrade to video gaming would come out. That was the Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 was a revolutionary console for its time, featuring photorealistic graphics, HD (for those HDTVs that would become standard by the time its successors launched), and it was probably the last console with tons of good games. A year later, the PS3 would launch offering most of the same video games, and the Wii. The Wii was a dated console that relied on a gimmick, sold more mainly to casuals, and had many games that didn’t sell well because the audience wanted to play reskins of Wii Sports. The PS3 however was technically on-par with the Xbox 360, and in some areas vastly more people owned a PS3. From 2005 to 2012, the most innovative games were either released on the PS3/360, or were better on both.The Xbox 360 was a state-of-the-art console, even as it suffered from the same issues that in hindsight, everything of that era suffered from (bumpgate, which affected the PS3 and PC GPUs of the era as well). Around 2008 the issues would be “ironed out” with later revisions of the console and repaired units. It’s just with the 360, it was unfortunate enough to have these failures happen while the consoles were new as opposed to several years later (as was the case with the PS3). While my console suffered from the E74 issue, after it was repaired it has lasted a long time. I only moved off of it when I got a Jasper console from a thrift store, and a NTSC-J console for imports. Yet the important thing with the 360 is, it was probably the last time anything interesting happened in the console sphere. Since then, consoles seem to be for either broke people or “normies” who don’t know anything about PC gaming, or who don’t want to fight their computer. But more importantly, stagnation has hit gaming hard.The gamesThe Xbox 360 was a turning point for gaming in the eyes of many because now you could play games that looked and ran better than PS2 or Original Xbox games. While there were some photorealistic games on the GameCube and Xbox, the Xbox 360 had games at a higher resolution as well across the board. Many games took sacrifices by running at 30 frames a second to push more photorealistic graphics with amazing lighting, and many 360 games hold up visually well to this day. Games that pushed 60 frames a second like Call of Duty also stand out. But graphics aren’t everything, and it was the wide variety of games the Xbox 360 had, both on disc and in the Xbox Live store, that made it memorable.The Xbox 360 was probably the last console to have a diverse library of games, in the era when GameStop still sold games before the ThinkGeek merger turned them into a Funko Pop shop. The big-name games were massive and I’m sure you might know the names of many of them or played many of them if you’re old enough. But the 360 had everything for everyone. It had arcade ports and shmups, many of which needed a Japanese console to run. Cave ported nearly their entire arcade output of the era to the 360, while other smaller devs had their games on the console. It had a lot of mid-budget games that vanished by the time the Xbox One came out, before smaller budget studios popped back up outside of the publishing system. It had a lot of arcade ports and remakes of old games on Xbox Live Arcade, many of which were delisted. It had rereleases back when those were good and you didn’t need to worry about cut content and whatnot, when the worst you’d see was performance issues. But most importantly, it had a lot of games you don’t find on new consoles from movie tie-in games to mid-budget games (before those devs popped back up outside the publisher system).But most importantly, the big tentpole AAA games were actually good. It sure helped that not only were there still smaller budget games, but even the games with insane budgets had lower budgets. Modern Warfare 2 from 2009 cost $40-50 million to make, only reaching $200 million with the marketing blitz it had. In 2020, Black Ops Cold War cost $700 million to develop! Sure, that game had photorealistic models of Ronald Reagan, but is it even as memorable as Modern Warfare 2 was where people still reference it to this day? I mean people still talk about the airport shooting level or a mission about defending Burger Town. This is why you see fewer AA games, because all the money that could have bankrolled Raven to make another weird FPS went to photorealistic Ronald Reagan. Or worse, developers were wanting games to sell unrealistic numbers to break even.What really made the 360 stand apart was the sheer number of games. Because AAA games had lower budgets back in the day and shorter development times for the most part, there were far more games coming out on the 360. A video on the timeline of the 360 only happens to show off the “big name” games, so many other games weren’t included.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5u8jyPIrIYWhile early signs of rot were setting in at the very end of the consoles lifespan (online passes, DLC and “Disc-Locked Content”, the Kinect gimmick games, and loot boxes on some of the last games), this was also where some of the finest games of all time were released.The online experience was betterOn the Xbox 360, the online ecosystem was laxer and less moderated than today. Sure, you probably knew a guy who had his bio or motto set to “Code of Conduct” back in the day, but you could get away with banter and arguments. You could also socialize with people freely on the Xbox. I remember how abrasive some people were on the Xbox, but I was able to play Halo 3 and meet cool people back in the day online. At least before everyone jumped platforms (backwards compatibility is very important), I made many friends on the “100-friend limit” Xbox 360.Halo 3 in particular was the ultimate social game thanks to several features. The first is that the game was heavily integrated with a website (not an app that gets shut down/incompatible with new phones). This meant that you could log in and check your stats, check the last few games you played online, and view screenshots and download custom maps to your Xbox. Halo 3 also featured this cool feature where you could “party up” with random players. As the game had tight integration with all of the lobbies of the game, you could then change this matchmaking party into a custom game lobby or co-op lobby, and everyone would invite their friends. On online games, socialization is important and this is where the Xbox 360 peaked. Halo 3 also had the Forge Mode, where you could create your own maps with other players even and share them online. The best part? You didn’t need a PC to do this, you could do this right from your console. On top of this, party chat worked across all games and you didn’t need to use Discord just to chat.Other games also had solid online features integrated with the consoles network, while certain Call of Duty titles were clever by disabling party chat. This forced you to chat with other players in the lobby, leaving the world with some fun arguments that you can only get on VRChat nowadays because of AI voice chat bans. The famous “riot shield argument” is a relic of a time that’s gone and not allowed anymore.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8_-EXS3DDsOf course, there were some problems. As the console aged, around 2010-11 some hackers found out how to modify the console, break the security, and cheat online. Stealth servers popped up and the sheer amount of cheaters overran some games. It got to the point where Activision realized they could no longer trust console manufactures and took matters into their own hands. When the PS3 security got blown open even harder in 2011, one of the CoD devs blamed the console makers for security issues as their entire threat model was relying on them to ban cheaters. With CoD Black Ops in 2010, Treyarch announced they would ban modders and many cheaters were banned while Black Ops 2 was the main title people played. I know because back in the day there were few, if any cheaters on that game compared to MW2.The controllerThe Xbox 360 controller is nearly perfect, with an ideal shape and it works great for the kinds of games it had. The only problem is the D-Pad was pretty awful and “spongy”, and it got to the point where an improved controller with a new d-pad was released years later. There were also third-party controllers for fighting games and anything that needed precise d-pad input, like shmups for example. But most importantly, it had a headphone jack where you could plug in a 2.5 earpiece (as was common on phones in 2005) and voice chat with people. There was also a text input chatpad that worked for writing messages and specific games that had text input, and when the console was new you could have MSN chats where the notification window came up. Now that was cool! Too bad that went away when MS killed MSN…It was backwards compatible on Day One*Everyone keeps pointing to the one announcement as where the Xbox One failed, but that wasn’t the big one. It was the fact that the Xbox One launched with no backwards compatibility at launch. This meant that there was zero reason to stay locked into your Xbox ecosystem of games. It was only nearly two years in that Microsoft waited to announce backwards compatibility on the One.The Xbox 360 had backwards compatibility from day one, and while the whitelist of games suffered from dodgy emulation and high-profile omissions, you could still play Halo 2 online on an Xbox 360. This ensured that Xbox owners had a path forward onto the next console to some degree. On the Xbox One, not only did backwards compatibility take years to launch but while the emulation was vastly improved, you were also locked into a subset of the 360 library. It seemed like there was an eternal wait before more games were playable, and there’s fewer games playable on the One than there are on the 360. Yet many high-profile games were added including CoD and Halo, and had this been a thing on day one maybe the Xbox One wouldn’t have struggled so much. On top of that, if you owned a 360 you could buy into older classic Xbox games that you never played. Nobody ever looks at this aspect but in the era of owning digital game libraries, it was a much more serious oversight than the initial Xbox One announcement and the $500 price tag. If Microsoft had said “you can play Black Ops 2 on your Xbox One” in 2013 more people would have bought in. Instead, gamers had to wait until 2017 to be able to do this!Yet nothing as good came afterwardsFor Microsoft, the 360 would be the best-selling console they would make, and the best they would ever make. After the 360 Microsoft really lost the plot. While sloptubers might tell you it was the reveal of the Xbox One that blew it, that was only just one of many factors that killed the brand. The big problem is that Microsoft is a mismanaged company. The Xbox One would be marked with canceled games, failed launches (the Halo MCC), and would be unfortunately released as gaming started to rot itself. While the Xbox One (and PS4) have some really good games, there are fewer games on those platforms that either aren’t on the PC, or that are actually worth playing. The Xbox One era is when rot really took over gaming.Anyone making fun of how many 360 games felt like Michael Bay movies should have seen what would come next. On one hand, the Xbox One could run games at higher resolutions and framerates than the 360 could dream of, with even Battlefield 4 on the 360 feeling like a pale imitation of the Xbox One version. On the other hand, there was a lot more propaganda inserted into games as time went on. Then games started to feel less polished, more rushed, and more forgettable overall. Even if a good game came out, it wouldn’t sell so well and would only be rediscovered if a YouTuber made a video on it.It still pales in comparison to the wasted generation of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, where people ask themselves “what’s the point of a console”. Nowadays consoles feel like Chromebooks compared to PCs, gaming platforms for broke people who just want to play the largest video games. In fact, the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally handheld PC has been seen as Microsoft waving the white flag in terms of hardware, as they port their games over to other platforms (including Halo). It’s drawing comparisons to the final days of Sega in the console market for a good reason: this is what happened when the Dreamcast died and Sonic was ported to the GameCube.But more importantly, nothing feels like it’s innovative anymore especially on the Series X/S and PS5. When the Xbox 360 was new, the NES was a 20-year-old retro console, and it wouldn’t be long before “I love the 80s” nostalgia pandering media and “angry game reviewers” would blossom. In those 20 years, so many advancements happened that you could tell each new console was better than the last. The SNES/Genesis, the PS1/N64/Saturn, and PS2/GameCube/Dreamcast/Xbox were all advancements over the previous generation. When the Xbox One was new, a lot of people online watching only crunched and compressed gameplay on YouTube didn’t see a difference between Black Ops II and Battlefield 4 graphically. Now people are looking at 10-year-old games and thinking they look impressive still on the Xbox One/PS4. When the 360 was new…10-year-old games were SNES, PS1, and early 3d arcade games. While the Xbox One and PS4 were a lesser leap over their predecessors, the Xbox Series and PS5 seem as if they’re not giving you anything new. Wow there’s ray tracing and the puddles look different.When the original Xbox came out, the pitch was that it’d have graphics on the level of the Pixar movie “Toy Story”. The 360 was when graphics were “good enough” for many, when graphics hit that level where they could try to look like a Pixar movie. By the time the Xbox One came out, games could look like a playable Pixar movie but with higher framerates. In fact, when Kingdom Hearts 3 came out on the Xbox One this went beyond a benchmark into reality.It seems as if the latest generation of gaming is buried with technical debt. You’ll hear about AI upscaling (blurry) and frame generation (which causes latency) as Band-Aids for technical issues in gaming, or about the “UE5 Stutter”. The UE5 look in particular is associated with bland photorealistic games that run like shit. You’ll hear about all these graphical buzzwords and yet games look barely better than an Xbox One/PS4 or even a 360 game. If the Xbox 360 to Xbox One transition was muddied by disdain towards gaming, this time around people are asking what they’re getting out of this. They’re only buying PS5s because games are dropping the PS4 now.It still holds upIf you’re into aviation, you might know the story of the Douglas DC-3, an airliner that was repurposed and mass produced as a WWII transport plane, the C-47. It’s famous because it has outlived many of its successors and the company itself. While most early jet engine aircraft were regulated to museums and scrapyards as newer and safer planes came out, the DC-3 continues to be in service because there are niches that other planes just cannot fill. It’s commonly stated that “the only replacement for a DC-3 is another DC-3”, as it can land on grass or dirt runways in undeveloped areas. One company even manufactures rebuilt and upgraded DC-3 planes, as a testament to the types longevity.The Xbox 360 and PS3 still hold up to this day, as the games were just better. Yet while older games around the time of the Xbox 360 launch felt clunky and all, not a lot has changed gameplay wise from the 360 to today. The same goes with graphics, as the graphics of 360 games are “good enough” for most people. But if you don’t believe me that the 360 will never die, take a look at the badupdate exploit.For the longest time, the Xbox 360 was “unhackable” through software means. You could not softmod the console because the security was well-designed with hypervisors, and to modify a 360 you had to basically either get a console with an old dashboard that could be “jtagged”, or use the Reset Glitch Hack exploit that would “glitch” the CPU into a state where it could run unsigned code. Then in March 2025, Grimdoomer released an exploit for the Xbox 360 that allowed unsigned code to run. Initially it was complicated and had a 30% success rate that could take 20 minutes for each run, along with requiring specific games. In a few months, not only was the exploit dramatically sped up, but someone found an exploit in the Xbox 360 avatar menu that allowed you to exploit any console without a game. This allows for homebrew, breaking region locking, and most importantly running delisted Xbox Live Arcade games.Both the Xbox 360 and its main competitor (the PS3) had tons of games that aged well still. By the amount of years since launch, the Xbox 360 is considered a retro console in the same way the PS2 is, or the same way the NES was in 2005. Everyone’s older now to the point Modern Warfare 2 could be considered a “retro game”. Yet because of cultural stagnation and the fact the games were just so damn good on the Xbox 360, people still are interested in this console to this day. The fact that the main Xbox 360 and PS3 servers are still up along with the servers for many games is a testament to this. Most Dreamcast and the Original Xbox Live servers didn’t last 10 years after the consoles were discontinued, and the PS2’s DNAS servers were pulled after 16 years.Who knows when both servers will be shutdown, or if there will be replacements like how other vintage consoles have them now (though badupdate makes this easier and the PS3 has some private servers.) What is important is that the Xbox 360 has aged as well as it has, because it and the PS3 were the last great gaming consoles. It’s also because not a whole lot of games worth playing are coming out, and it’s why the Xbox 360 will continue to be a bright spot for years to come. Who knows how gaming will be in 10 years from now, I’m not optimistic but it’s going to have to get itself out of the rut it’s in.What else can I say? Go buy a $50 360 and have fun remembering when games were not only good, but when it seemed like so many games were coming out. If you want something a bit different, look into the arcade ports or the NTSC-J games, or the niche games released on the console. Just be careful, you might be having more fun than you will playing a game with AI Voice Chat Moderation.