Envoy of the Ayatan

So, I started using the internet around 1995 ish. And there is a lot I love about it and a lot that was extremely difficult. But many people now will look back and see it as some perfect idyllic time of free information exchange, as though there was nothing wrong with it and that's... simply not true.

Now, there is a lot I like about the old internet, don't get me wrong. I like that capitalism hadn't got it's claws into it, and the lack of centralized services made people forced to carve out a place for their own. But it had.. so many hurdles and was so inaccessible in a lot of ways. So, here's a bunch of things that irritated me about the internet in 1995-2005 that I think is, in-fact, a lot better now. I'm gonna babble about my own experiences with this era to give an idea for those that didn't experience this.

Technology

The truth about the internet is that to use it, it is in conversation with the technology you use. Want to digitize your art? That's gonna cost you a 1400$ scanner and a SCISI card. Want to draw on the computer directly? Well you better hope you know someone in the AutoCAD industry to hook you up with an Intuos tablet and that you have a free serial port to use it. Or wait a few years and get one of the USB ones. (Also likely setting you back a few thousand dollars) For people that didn't grow up in this era, they have no idea how incredible it was to see drawing tablets in any sort of tech shop, this used to be a direct order specialty shop sort of deal.

And then there's the computer that runs it all that you use to access the internet in the first place. Putting together a computer was more of a hassle then, than it is now. I'm sure people that didn't grow up with it find it confusing now, but back then? There were way more points of failure and chance for incompatibility between boards, CPU, and RAM. Now, you just have to make sure the motherboard's socket matches the CPU and maybe the voltage in a few higher end cases. The RAM and GPU are pretty much plug and play with the only setback being possibly throttled by the board if the board isn't strong enough, but at least the computer will work. For older systems, a mismatch like that could cause it to not even start.

And then the SCISI card... oh the SCISI card. It's an expensive piece of hardware that was terribly finicky. I had to write a BASH script to stop something related to the Scanner from initializing so that I could actually boot into windows without safe mode because it'd fail every time otherwise. Little errors on devices these days pale in comparison to the catastrophic failures hardware from 1995-2005 were capable of.

After 2005, USB was more ubiquitous, scanners were both affordable and easier to use, and computers were easier to build and troubleshoot.

Software

I don't know how many people even in their 30's really appreciates the breadth of software we have accessible to us now. When I was getting into this, there was Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, the extremely rudimentary OS-provided imaging programs. Both Photoshop and PaintShopPro would set you back a couple hundred dollars. I will say the upside to this era was the copy protection wasn't nearly as extreme. You could get away with burning a disc and pass around the same key and get it installed on all your friend's computers without issue. GIMP entered the scene around 1998, but access to it was pretty much only for the especially tech savy that could compile their own version for their OS, or for those on an OS that was supported by others. But if you think GIMP was limited now, it was more limited, then. And while technically Pixia was around, unless you were at least somewhat familiar with Japanese, you were unlikely to be aware of the software, let alone be able to use it, but if you could it was one of the few free options that real. I am of the opinion the existence of Pixia in 1998, is why the digital art scene in Japan was so big.

openCanvas released in 2000, and became wildly popular for it's networking and overall nicer brush controls. Paint.Net hit the scene in 2004, followed by Mypaint in 2005, Krita in 2005. So as you can see, options were pretty thin until the end of this era. Now a days, there are a wealth of both free and affordable applications for anyone can use and I feel like this gets taken for granted far too often.

The Internet Itself

In the internet around 1995-2005, the options you had for sharing your art were... slim. After you got past the hurdle of technology and software to even make the art in digital form to begin with, the places where you could share and host it was minimal. You could.. build a website (which many did), post to a forum (which still often required that you have that art uploaded somewhere first, in order to even show it because many 'forums' did not have direct uploads), or be good with IRC and it's file transfer. (I did not use IRC). But your options were limited and required some amount of technical skill, and if you didn't have those technical skills, well.. your options were more thin. I'm going to list a timeline of what was available, and maybe you'll see what I mean. (I can only speak for the English side of things, I'm afraid)

Newgrounds 1995, Okay so technically this site itself pre-dates the others but it started out as only a collection of Flash works and they had to be manually submitted and uploaded to the service. Art wasn't openly accepted until about 2000 and accounts didn't happen until about 2001 but art submissions were still directly sent. Direct uploads for art to Newgrounds itself didn't happen until 2010. (from what I've been able to garner from a cursory glance on web archive, because FOR SOME REASON, THERE IS NO HISTORY OF NEWGROUNDS ON FANLORE.ORG)
Elfwood 1996, a gallery that was high-fantasy-only and then kinda branched out into scifi later, was jurried, (in other words every submission was reviewed) and required the disclosure of your legal name in order to make an account. They didn't allow fanart until 2002 (my guess was the advent of DeviantArt pulled a lot of their Traffic)
Epilogue.net 1998, A competitor to Elfwood in that it was even more strict on what it accepted because it only wanted 'the best' art.
MediaMiner 1998, This was first a fan fiction service and then later added a fanart gallery. It was so much easier to use than Elfwood that it was such a big deal to me at the time.
Side 7 1998, a fan BBS turned art gallery, that I only knew as a Sonic Fan Art gallery so I never used it.
VCL 1999, A very rudimentary gallery site for furry art. No comments, but made for a nice archive. But only furry art.

DeviantArt 2000, Unless you were on the net at this time, it's difficult for me to describe just what a Big Deal DeviantArt was. Up until this point the galleries most people had access to were restricted in some way either by access or subject. (as you can see from the list above) DeviantArt was the first multi-media gallery site that you could just make an account and directly upload to. Every other site before it was Juried, had strict restrictions on subjects, were cumbersome to use, or lacked a feature here and there. DeviantArt had ALL the features, NO subject restriction, and was a place that Writers, Photographers, Sculptors, Designers, Crafters, and genuinely any medium that could be artistic. (There was an absence of music but that's because of some weirdness with the other project DA had going which honestly is a shame.) Many of these niches had NO WHERE to share their work before this as so many curated art services were only Illustrations or Fiction. Photographers, Crafters, Interface designers, were all forgotten.

And then, SELLING stuff? Well, there were no easy plug and play merchant services until PayPal hit the scene in 2002, and even then it was feature limited compared to today. Before that you had to apply for a merchant service, I don't know if you've ever done that but it's a pain. And the cart services they had available at the time? Absolutely jank. To make your own store you had to pay for hosting, set up your own cart, purchase an SSL cert (most services didn't offer free ones at the time), pay for the merchant service, and then have the technical skill to keep it all running. And of you wanted someone to do all that for you. And hey if you wanted to do it on the cheap, you could take credit cards over the phone or have people mail you checks. A surprising amount of people did both these things. You have no idea how PayPal's embedded purchase buttons changed the scene unless you were deep in the weeds of everything else, but that wasn't until near the end of that 10-year span. Self-service sales platforms like Etsy didn't exist until 2005.

And then, use of assets without attribution was rampant between 1995-2005. There was a whole movement in 1998 to protest this problem called Grey Day, where artists would collectively change their site to remove all graphics from the site to show what it would be like if they all stopped making what they do. The only request was attribution. There's def still an issue with use without attribution but image search makes it a lot easier to find the source. That didn't exist in 1995-2005.
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These days, people take for granted the ease of access. Coding a website now is easier than it ever has been, even side-stepping the fact that there are very few WYSIWYG options, there are still free CMS and the code itself is easier to understand than it used to be and I say this as someone that's always struggled with code. There are more options to set your roots down, you have more control over where you want to go. Hosting is incredibly cheap, as are domains, nothing is stopping you from making your own house and that used to be much more difficult in 1995-2005.

It's easier to build a PC than it used to be, there are videos with guides, archives of drivers, and a whole bustling community of alternative OS options with more users dedicated to making drivers for those OS than there ever used to be in decade I'm referring to. And we are spoiled for choice for both software and hardware. 3 viable competing tablet companies! Making stuff that won't knock out your entire paycheck!
Even with the way things are now, with the content restrictions and age verification, we've been through this before. There was a whole era of Credit Card Verification, and that crashed and burned as well. Of course, that doesn't mean it doesn't require us to fight for it :U As difficult as some things are, turmoil is important for lasting change, but you gotta do something about it. It sucks right now, but I know I for one am determined to make sure the now isn't permanent.

The internet has never been a perfect place for anyone. There are some aspects that had their heyday were great and better than some of what's going on right now, without a doubt, but like everything, once capitalism sinks its claws in, it dies.

IDK I think it's better to learn to the past than yearn for it. Romanticing the past doesn't help our current or our future, it prevents us from learning from our mistakes.

So I was recently made aware of this little thing
https://www.ocsocialnetwork.com/

It is a Mobile-Only service at this time, and while I tend to steer clear of services that are mobile-only, I have made an exception for this because of how unique it is in it's offering. The last time any service had anything like this, was a long forgotten OC resource service that I forgot the name of. But each OC account was it's own profile which gave you the ability to make blog posts as your OC. Toyhouse has the ability to post as OCs but lacks the social media front that allows you to run and manage a social media presence as the character which is sliiightly different.

So I've just made an account there and as one would expect of a mobile app, it is pretty restrictive in what it permits. Also, you cannot create an account with an email, you have to use one of those oauth account creation things and currently they only let you set up with a Google account. This is also something that I find to be a personal deterrent but my interest in the novelty won me over in this case, but I know for others it would be a deal-breaker so thus I wanted to make note of that.

The service itself is pretty simple, the TOS is pretty boiler plate (and has an arbitration clause FYI), but it's early in it's life so we'll see if it sinks or floats in time. For the moment, it's a fun character exercise to write a profile as though the character were explaining themselves. There's not too many features, you can post and share images on posts, use tags, block tags, block profiles, and it has some sort of 'daily wrapped' thing that gives you a summary of what you wrote and how you interacted. It's very AI summary data scraping but make of that what you will. Mostly, I'm just interested in the environment it offers and the writing exercise that provides.

I had mentioned this service and some of it's dealbreakers to others and in the course of conversation it dawned on me that this is exactly the kind of thing that would benefit from a federated social media service.

The biggest problem I've had with a lot of federated platforms is that either the platform, or their users, tout them as a 'replacement' for large centralized services, not understanding that there are benefits to centralization that federation cannot replace such as optics and reach. They function best when they are played to their strengths and those strengths are when they're used as a vector for a niche community with the option to let others outside of the community peer in if they want. A social media platform where it is expected that everyone signed in is playing in-character is exactly the kind of thing that would play with a federated service to its strengths.

It is an island unto itself, which is important especially if you want to make an environment that a specific kind of role play that everyone knows and partakes in. The use of the local feed would help keep this facade vs the pitfalls of making a character profile on a centralized service like tumblr. If other islands would like to watch the shenanigans they can opt in to do so without making an account on the service. Being on it's own island can also set the 'rules of engagement' from those outside the island, and individual accounts can choose to participate with that or not.

I certainly don't have the time or means to run such a service, but I'm putting the thought out there for someone else to see that might have the means to host such a thing, because it would be very fun.

I'm still learning about this as I write but this is a neat little thing that got started called the Octothorpe Protocol

https://docs.octothorp.es/

I don't know if I can explain it adequately but I'll link to the 32bit cafe forum post that would do a better job of it.

https://discourse.32bit.cafe/t/we-made-hashtags-you-can-use-on-regular-websites-i-hope-you-like-them/3361

I really like this a lot because it's a much more forward thinking approach to the 'idea' of webrings. One of the follies of modern webrings is that they don't attempt to utilize new technology beyond a GIT repository, and that only accounts for a small handful. (I find GIT interfaces incredibly obtuse, personally) It removes a lot of the micromanagement of typical webrings and affords a more flexible system that can adapt to how the website in question changes by permitting the web owner to add/remove context 'tags' as they update their site.

One of the downsides to WebRings was the need for someone to always be doing inventory on the ring. Making sure all the links were up to date and to remove bad URLS. This eliminates a lot of that, and IMO, makes it much easier to adapt to. It's only in version 0.5 so I'm really looking forward to seeing how this project grows. intrigued

Anyone that's spoken to me on the topic of Furaffinity knows that typically I've repeated the same thing for years: I'll use it when both Dragoneer and Yak are gone.

This post is about, why.

First and foremost, yes, I have an account on FA (Furaffinity) right now. I made it during a time where I had little social options and was losing friends and it felt like the only way to keep up with them. After some improvement in my life, I dropped it and resorted to only using it to advertise commissions. Had I been in a better emotional state at the time, I don't think I would have made an account for anything more than name-camping, if I made one at all. I say this all to quell any perceived contradictions for the what I'm about to say.

The next important thing: If you are unaware of the history of FA, it's important to know that its initial inception was by another person. I had an account with them at that time, but when it proved to be too difficult for the original owner after a significant security breach, Dragoneer stepped in. Already because of the breach I decided to let my original account go, despite it not being compromised. But already, my opinion of FA was poor because the framework already had poor security.

In the decade that followed I was very glad I went with my instinct to not use the service as over and over again accounts were compromised. Password leaks, comment exploits, compromised PM system, staff accounts compromised. And the worst thing is, many of these security issues were warned of before they got bad. They had the chance to fix it, and did not.

You can find a whole timeline of issues on FA from 2005-2016 compiled here, with citations
https://stuff.veekun.com/fa-timeline.html

The most infamous of these incidents was the 'Furry Leaks' fiasco. Before it happened, a user on the site pointed out the exploit, warned of the problem it could present and even offered to fix it. Yak, lead sys admin and developer of Furaffinity, ignored the warning and refused the assistance. Not long after that, someone used that exploit do get database dumps of several prominent accounts to expose for all to see. Hundreds of people had their personal communications, phone numbers and addresses exposed to the public. Something that could have entirely avoided had Yak any idea what he was doing.

But it was because of this leak we learned just how poor a leader Dragoneer truly was. (heads up for brief mentions of human and animal sexual abuse)

I never really had much of a strong opinion about Dragoneer but I felt his handling on moderation was especially poor. From petty bans to ignoring multiple counts of harassment. But the note leaks exposed some far worse administration decisions. Like telling a user ‘pretty please remove the journals about having sex with your horse on the website’, cus he's worried about the feds. Or telling someone he doesn't know what to do but he's sorry, when a member confessed to him they had been sexually assaulted by a significantly popular member of the community. A person that Dragoneer then hired on to Furaffinity staff. And this is just of the notes I *personally* read.

I'm not saying he's evil, but Dragoneer was a terrible leader and Furaffinity is better without him. Do I think it's good that he died? No, of course not. His death was a tragedy brought on by our poor medical system but that's another discussion. He should have handed over the keys ages ago, that's how I would have preferred he be removed from the position. But due to his absence, it's becoming very clear that his leadership has been holding back Furaffinity for over a Decade.

Since Sciggles has taken the reins, Furaffinity has implemented multiple advances to the site that had been promised over a decade ago are finally seeing the light. Tag filters are finally a thing on Furaffinity, there are display name changes on the road to username changes. More talented staff has been brought on and it shows in the speed and quality of the updates. The advertisement inquiry turn around is the best it's ever been since they first launched it.

The moderation team has been whipped into shape, wrongful account bans were overturned, more clear and reasonable guidelines were put in place, and mods that abused their power were removed from their positions. It still has a long way to go, of that there is no doubt, but this is the first time in the life of FA that I have ever genuinely thought I might want to use the service.

(To make it clear, all this to say that I think Sciggles is a far better leader and steward of FurAffinity than Dragoneer ever was or could be. She is the best person for the job, and doesn't deserve any of the misogyny and other hate that's been sent her way over the years.)

But one thing is holding me back.

Yak

Yak continues to hold back the advancement of Furaffinity is the single worst thing about it right now. He is the one responsible for every security failure on that site, yet he is still, somehow, on the staff despite his multiple critical failures. It is common knowledge that he is unwilling to work with anyone, as has been seen through the years of his spurning all assistance and refusal to give anyone database access.

Every time there is discussion about the different platforms to use and where to sink one's time into, I have to warn anyone using Furaffinity, to treat it like their password for that service is already compromised. Never use the notes, never put any personal information in the notes if you do use them. Because you never know if Yak's incompetence and hubris could cause another notes breach. You never know if another hole Yak refuses to fill has exposed passwords, again.

Even if the service was moderately secure, it doesn't even work that well. They pay a whole lot of money for the servers, with specs that don't exactly make sense for what they're trying to run, but the service isn't speedy which means the infrastructure itself is poor. They even recently had a major database issue that proved how poor the structure is. Or the time they spent a lot of money on a new server and didn't touch it for a year. And that's all Yak's doing. No one has touched the databases since him for over 15 years. Every poor service element of the website lays squarely on him.

And then there's all the rumors. Such as the rumor that the real reason Yak is unwilling to give anyone access to the databases is because he's using the servers for his own needs. Game servers, or another secret website. Once I heard it was some sort of niche auction website. This is, of course, unsubstantiated, but bears investigating nonetheless. This is what happens when you have one sole person responsible for the server of a website of this scale with absolutely no means to check what he is doing with it.

So I still stand by my statement.

I'll use Furaffinity in earnest when Yak is no longer on staff.

The other day I was browsing through the F-droid library and I ran into this service:

https://delta.chat

This is one of those things that is so novel I'm surprised there hasn't been anything like this set up, sooner. (or maybe it has been done before and I just never knew) But it is a chat-based interface that uses an IMAP mailserver back-end. That's it. It's a fancy email client that looks and functions like an Instant Messenger service.

While it is possible to use the service with an existing email account you have, there is the option to set up an specialized 'chatmail' account. 'Chatmail' servers that are mail servers set up specifically optimized to facilitate this type of function, in addition to ensuring it is end to end encrypted. They also offer the code available to host your own Chatmail server if you have the means to do so.

Adding contacts is a little odd, as they can only be added via QR codes or contact links, to add contacts. (You can find mine, here) they offer no means of adding other's email addresses as a contact.

Personally, due to the age and collection of spam my public email accounts have accrued over the years, I figured I'd set up one of the provided chatmail accounts. I went with a tarpit.fun account. (when you set up an account it'll auto generate a random string of letters for the email. You have to check each service to find out the steps to make a specific, unique named account. ) I have no one else to test with this ATM so I can't speak much for its service and how it feels but it's an interesting novelty, maybe it will catch on in certain circumstances.

I think the decision to use a mailserver as a chat backend in the current day is pretty neat. (And it's nice to have another end to end encrypted chat service option that isn't married to your phone or phone number =_=)

Okay so like, you know how not long ago I made a post about how I said that you never know how long anything will be around so if something is important you better save it? Well, yesterday, creative asset storefront Design Cuts gave a notice that it was closing its door and merging with creative market. There was no lead up to this closure and merger with creative market. I even double checked my emails and the most recent one I got was:

On Jan 14th 9am mst I had an email announcing a lettering sale on the platform. No mention of a closure and it wasn't listed as any sort of 'last gasp' sale.

And then on Jan 16th 1pm mst I recieved an email that Design Cuts was shutting down.

So as you can see, extremely sudden! Not expected at all!!

I started poking around trying to find maybe some social media presence that said anything and I found was the Facebook account and there are a lot of comments as floored as I am.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=842300674565094&id=100063555081925

A lot of people with paid assets with no means of downloading them that didn't get the chance to make backups before everything died. Some people were even charge for the monthly service just two days ago.

Like, for the longest time the polyvore shutdown ranked as one of the worst I had seen but even that one still had like two weeks to get your archives. The Waterfall Social shutdown was bad, too, but at least it also had a couple weeks to claim archives. This is a service with paid assets and both buyers and sellers were left in the dust.

So yeah, remember that anything can disappear at any time and to save anything you think you would miss because you never know when it'll happen.

The link roundup today is a lot of technical stuff, tools and scripts. Apart from the first link lol

https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7fc225d
Wordpress and WP Engine has been going through ... a conflict, to say the least.
This is a constantly updating article/archive of all the different back and forth happening, it's going to be the best you'll find to catch up on what is even happening along with sources every step of the way.

https://github.com/TealfulEyes/sm-filters/tree/main
A Ublock filter for certain socialmedia that hides the numbers on different services if that interests you.

https://lyra.horse/arrupted/
A live hex editor with preview to corrupt images. I've done hex editing manually and this is just so cool to have something that does it lives. (PS, Jpeg works best for this)

Discord is currently blocked in Russia and while it might be overturned, I'm compositing some of the tools from This Blog Post that could be useful to anyone. Most of it are related to DPI blocking tools.
The first link doesn't work but this seems to be the tool?
https://topersoft.com/programs/youtubecccelerator
But this is also a Goodbye DPI, also the page has a list of similar projects:
https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI
A DPI blocker for Android:
https://github.com/dovecoteescapee/ByeDPIAndroid/
A Vetted VPN with a free option to use in a pinch, and pro plans are 70$ USD for the year:
https://windscribe.com/

https://htmlforpeople.com/
This has been shared around a few places and I plan on being another to share it. I like that it has so many screen caps and does one of the few things many of these guides don't do: Show people file structure. I would prefer there be more screencaps of file systems. It mostly focuses on uploading to Neocities but it also goes over self-hosting. It also shows examples of different kinds of pages to get ideas on how to structure information. One of the better starting-places I've seen for people that are brand new to the concept.

For years, http://mewtopia.freehosting.net/ had remained as a corner of the old web that remained completely intact and largely untouched. Knowing that there is a high possibility this might not always be the case, I made the effort to get the whole site archived on Archive.org and it was a good thing I did because a few days ago when I wanted to check something out of idle curiosity, the site was gone. The domain is currently up for sale and the effort I went to archiving it is likely the only reason all the fanart links are currently intact on the archive.

If you like something, save it.

The internet is both Eternal and Ephemera, and there is no guarantee you'll be able to correctly predict either of these outcomes in any given situation.

Some time ago, as I watched certain staples of the net go down and lots of history lost with it, I made a decision to try to remember to save anything I felt was even remotely useful. And I am so glad I've been doing that. My references folder is 16 Gigs. It would be larger if I had the good sense to start saving indiscriminately, sooner. I don't have to open up an app or worry about finding something again because I saved it! It's all in organized categories!

I just spent a good couple hours saving images off a fashion site because it's full of interesting ideas and good references for poses and faces and texture of fabric. I've seen too many designer's websites change/remove their portfolios after a time so saving them ensures I always have a reference. Still to this day I'm hunting down uses of Moyra's Web Jewels and sad that I cannot access the drive that likely had some of the packs I saved as those are lost to time unless I can connect with someone else that saved them. I am also constantly so glad that I tracked down unique tracks, mashups, and remixes of things I really liked and downloaded them at the source before they disappeared from youtube and other sources altogether. I've got tracks from myspace and mp3.com that simply don't exist, anymore.

CoHost is being shut down, going Read Only as of October 1st, I'll be saving a lot of the silly little CSS toys that people posted there because they're neat. A niche fiction posting site Belletristica is going to be shut down likely this winter and they've got these very nicely rendered little gem images so I've saved them all simply because I like them. I'm glad I saved my old polyvore outfit collages, that service barely gave their users two weeks to archive before it was shut down for good. Automattic is working on converting Tumblr's backend to Wordpress, it's very likely old posts will break and be entirely unavailable, might be a good idea to back that up, too.

Seriously, if there is ever something you use frequently or feel like you'd really have a hard time if that thing disappeared, save it. Things could be ripped out from under you before you get a warning, and when that happens you'll be glad you spent the little time and space to save it.

Convenience in tech is both an important tool but also a poison to learning anything new.

When I suggest Dreamwidth to people the biggest complaint I see are people saying they can't find people or know how to navigate the site, and I get that, it takes more legwork to actually find activity. And I figured it was just the fact that it's an older interface, older sensibilities and the like so it's more difficult to adapt to with net intuition based on a more modern web. But lately I've seen this complaint of other new services that had much more modern features and interfaces. It wasn't until some people mentioned genuinely intentionally using the 'for you' tab on twitter, that it sunk in how reliant users these days have become on algorithmic suggestion to find new things.

ArtFight started July 1st, so all last month people were making accounts and sharing profiles. In a server I was in, someone complained about not being able to access their friend's page via search which I thought was.. odd. Like, yes there isn't a user search but you just plop their username into the URL. Like, you look at someone else's profile, figure out the URL structure for profiles, then plug the name in, basic problem solving. I thought this was an outlier but I saw another person complain about the same thing. And it really begun to sink in... just how little people seem to know how to 'use' the internet anymore.

Those using the net these days, of all generations, appear to either not know or forgotten some of what I consider to be, basic investigative practices. For that matter, many don't know or have forgotten the joy of just.. looking around, investigating. For example, any new service I use often has tags and the first thing I do is look at tags of personal interest to me and check out what's posted to them. I scour pages dozens of pages this way, and find new people to follow both names I'm familiar and unfamiliar with. I then look through those blogs and find blogs they've reposted from to find more interesting blogs that might not have been tagged. If the service has any community-like feature, I dig through all of those as well. By even the first day I've usually filled my follow list to more than enough people to at least see one new thing a week even when its slow.

But the vast majority of users apparently... do not do this.

The expected user experience of a new service is to attempt to find a 'for you' page and expect it to just... feed them posts they want and don't know what to do without it. And this is not a matter of me going 'kids these days don't know how to use computers' no the thing that is tripping me up is 'where's your sense of wonder?' like, I know people are using tags because everyone is using tags, that's not an old feature. Like, do you not get curious about what is being posted on a tag and want to dig through it? Do you not want to see what's out there and explore other blogs? The lack of drive and curiosity to see what's out there and use all resources available to do so is the thing that makes me sad.

There are Things going Down on social media platforms. Like, there always are but it seems to be More lately.

If you haven't heard the latest bustle, or maybe you have but you are lost in all the mess of Everything. Automattic (parent company of Wordpress and Tumblr) CEO, Matt, has been making some very poor decisions

https://www.supporthuman.cx/25feb24-roundup-a-masterclass-on-why-we-have-trust-safety-teams/
This article sums up everything going on, along with links to everything pertinent to the general conversation.

It is important to note that most people seem to see this as a good article that catalogues everything going on to easy access to the public. Which is 'funny' to me when many of the supporters of this blog are from CoHost, of which, some of it's users got into a frenzy over this post
https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4326164
That followed and documented the discussion of issues going on at CoHost. It's worth noting that the OP seems to do this of a lot of services, so it's not just picking on CoHost. However some CoHost users found the documenting of this conversation as 'creepy'
https://cohost.org/Aura/post/4455521-just-fyi
It all has an aura of a bad-faith read because the user Aura of CoHost calls it 'drama', but osteophage of Pillowfort never mentioned the word drama, at all, and never gave the impression that this was something to be made fun of. It was all very pragmatic and neutral presentation of the discussion. Which is pretty dang important when so much discussion about a service has piles and piles of vague reference upon vague reference of who knows how many comments.

This created a meta commentary of the commentary
https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4348483
digging into the arguments for and against this sort of documentation.

Which as also caused even more layers of meta-commentary
https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4398213

And now me, I'm adding to the meta lol

It's strange to me to think that when you're open and public about discussing the policies of a new company, to the point of possibly influencing it, that no one outside the community should ever comment on it. Like, this is the kind of work you see eventually go up in FanLore to give people an idea of 'how we got here' and really, what's so wrong with that?

There's a very strange development of CoHost users vs Pillowfort users, which I simply do not understand. (it seems to be more hostile on CoHost members, side. Maybe it's bias in the circles I keep, but it feels like CoHost members are much more hostile towards Pillowfort members and Pillowfort members are just kinda vibing and have no strong feeling about it.) And CoHost members then wonder why it is people don't adopt the service or are intimidated by it: Maybe because you are exuding hostility to anyone outside looking in?

IDK, I have no strong feelings about any of it, but I do like following web-community discussions.

Today I learned there is work on making a more 'current gen' IRC service, IRC v3
https://ircv3.net/
The key features being worked on are more persistent accounts with access to chat history (this appears to be something that can be optionally supported in the event a server does not want this feature)

It is very cool to see IRC get some modernization and ease-of-use updates in the wake of all the slacker-likes dominating the communication space.

Lately I've been checking out Misskey-based instances, specifically misskey.io and a fork of misskey called firefish.social. They're a microblog system but with additional features such as 4K character limit, 16 images per post, emoji reactions with even additional custom reactions per instance, a gallery feature that is unique, not just a media tab of all your media posts, built in custom color themes with the ability to make your own, and the choice of 3 layouts that are full screen with customizable widgets, a twitter-like layout, and a tweetdeck/mastodon-like layout with the multi-column view. It's one of the few services that doesn't just try to make twitter again but tries to do something its own and I very much appreciate that for it. I almost want to use it despite my aversion to microblogs.

However, when I was discussing this service with other people there were a lot of people were like 'that's great but it doesn't comply with GDPR so I can't use it.' And I thought that was kinda odd so I looked around and a LOT of misskey instances say this and I thought this was curious but then I started to think about it more and.... I'm not sure any federated service is GDPR compliant, even if they claim to be. (As a refresher, this is a pretty good page that breaks down expectations/requirements set out by the GDPR.)

So, my only frame of reference is Mastodon, I can't speak for any other federated services, but I know when one Mastodon instance was just taken offline with no warning the history of those accounts still remain on my account on a different instance that follows them. To be more specific, this happened with snouts.online. The instance was very popular among furries and shut down without notice, giving the users no time to initiate profile transfers or deletions. But, my account that follows some of those snouts online accounts? I can still see their entire post history. And there is nothing the account owners can really do to get those deleted. If I understand correctly, (correct me if I'm wrong if you're familiar with the tech) they would have to go to every instance that had followed their account, and request the data be removed. But even then, if someone with less technical knowledge is running the instance, I don't know if they'd be able to. Because as far as I can tell, nothing is in place on mastodon to be like 'hold up, this server is no longer around' and auto-scrub the info. And if that's the case, that would mean no mastodon instance is GDPR compliant, either. I hear they have flags to send to other servers in the case of an account deletion request, but it feels like nothing is in place for a server just straight up being taken offline, is an egregious oversight.

It's just really getting me thinking that privacy on a federated service might be even worse than privacy on some of the less above board private services. So many cases of the information being available on multiple services leaves so many more issues with privacy being breached or circumvented. What if someone is following you on an old mastodon instance that has a vulnerability that isn't updated and it exposes your followers-only and or 'direct message' posts? You wouldn't even know it's happening because it's not the instance you're using personally. Server owners are only responsible for contacting the people directly using the service, they have no obligation to contact to any other instances that are also interacting with their service and could also be effected by the breach. And how are they even supposed to know who to contact? I'm sure there's access information buried in the server but that's not something everyone is going to know how to find, especially since Mastodon in particular is 'marketed' as something everyone can set up.

Federation is a cool thing, and even with this issue I'm pointing out I don't want this to be taken as 'federation bad'. But I do think people need to be more technically educated on what they're working with. I also don't like when federated services are seen as inherently 'better'. They're side-grades, another way of communicating with one another, with it's own pros and cons as any other service. But for me, personally, I'm not much keen on making any federated service a 'home' or anything I can rest comfortably in. I can use it, I guess, but I just don't want to 'live' there, if that makes as much sense as it does on the internet, lol.

So, tumblr isn't a perfect place, let me say that right out the gate. But I am so tired of people conflating the choices made by the execs at Verizon with the ideologies and motivations of the entire current staff of Tumblr. The execs at Verizon, and the staff doing all the work coding and managing the service are not the same people and do not have the same goals. To say 'staff doesn't care and banned porn because it hurt their bottom line' is an inherent falsehood because Verizon made that choice, not the ~staff~ as a faceless blob. The current team now, under Automattic, is still the same thing, what Automattic wants and what actual tumblr staff wants, are not the same. So for that reason, I'm so exhausted by conversation that's just 'staff doesn't care' because there are more factors at work here, and so many people that work on and love the site are yanked around by the whims of execs that have no interaction with the service at all. (and I'll be honest, I hate any accusation that lumps every body of employees that worked on a thing as literally the same thing. There are so many instances where just a handful of people are making decisions for a whole group that no one wants or supports and those people don't deserve to shoulder the blame for that.) ANYWHO.

There's an obnoxious post going around that's like, sharing this news article from Feb 25, 2022
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/25/22949293/tumblr-nycchr-settlement-adult-content-ban-algorithmic-bias-lgbtq
with a caption to the effect of
'Oooo look at this bad article about Tumblr being sued for it's porn ban, share this around because tumblr doesn't want you to see it'

But like... if you actually read the article it's very favorable to tumblr. I suggest reading it for yourself but the major hits are:
Tumblr, under verizon when it instituted the porn ban, was being sued for disproportionately affecting LGBTQ+ users more than others in their porn ban. Specifically in the sense that the false positives it took down were mostly from that demographic and weren't in violation of the new rules.
The acquisition of Tumblr by Automattic happened in 2019, while the investigation was still on-going. Where Verizon dodged the suit at every turn, automattic co-operated with the investigation.
Tumblr settled the suit the day of the article's publication, not because there was any kind of overwhelming evidence, but out of courtesy. They were already making efforts to undo the damage that Verizon's automated takedown system had caused.

Liiikeee, this doesn't seem like something that paints the current owners in a bad light, if anything spreading this article doesn't seem like they're trying to expose the skeletons in Tumblr's closet, it's more like. The current owners admitted there was a problem and it should be investigated and agreed to settle out of good will. That's like... the ideal outcome. Which isn't difficult to see if you read the article. So what was supposed to be a dunk, is really just a boon. It's only a dunk if you read the headline and make assumptions based on conjecture and not fact.

Tumblr def still has it's issues, but it's really not the LGBTQ+-hostile place some people accuse it of being. This is not to say that execs at Automattic are all saints and no one has anything to worry about that, for goodness sakes I've never worked in absolutes, but they're still a far cry and have at least some earnesty in their efforts than Verizon ever had.