#and i know the user won't be an automatic no

[wordstome]

how c.ai works and why it's unethical

Okay, since the AI discourse is happening again, I want to make this very clear, because a few weeks ago I had to explain to a (well meaning) person in the community how AI works. I'm going to be addressing people who are maybe younger or aren't familiar with the latest type of "AI", not people who purposely devalue the work of creatives and/or are shills.

The name "Artificial Intelligence" is a bit misleading when it comes to things like AI chatbots. When you think of AI, you think of a robot, and you might think that by making a chatbot you're simply programming a robot to talk about something you want them to talk about, and it's similar to an rp partner. But with current technology, that's not how AI works. For a breakdown on how AI is programmed, CGP grey made a great video about this several years ago (he updated the title and thumbnail recently)

I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend you watch this because CGP Grey is good at explaining, but the tl;dr for this post is this: bots are made with a metric shit-ton of data. In C.AI's case, the data is writing. Stolen writing, usually scraped fanfiction.

How do we know chatbots are stealing from fanfiction writers? It knows what omegaverse is [SOURCE] (it's a Wired article, put it in incognito mode if it won't let you read it), and when a Reddit user asked a chatbot to write a story about "Steve", it automatically wrote about characters named "Bucky" and "Tony" [SOURCE].

I also said this in the tags of a previous reblog, but when you're talking to C.AI bots, it's also taking your writing and using it in its algorithm: which seems fine until you realize 1. They're using your work uncredited 2. It's not staying private, they're using your work to make their service better, a service they're trying to make money off of.

"But Bucca," you might say. "Human writers work like that too. We read books and other fanfictions and that's how we come up with material for roleplay or fanfiction."

Well, what's the difference between plagiarism and original writing? The answer is that plagiarism is taking what someone else has made and simply editing it or mixing it up to look original. You didn't do any thinking yourself. C.AI doesn't "think" because it's not a brain, it takes all the fanfiction it was taught on, mixes it up with whatever topic you've given it, and generates a response like in old-timey mysteries where somebody cuts a bunch of letters out of magazines and pastes them together to write a letter.

(And might I remind you, people can't monetize their fanfiction the way C.AI is trying to monetize itself. Authors are very lax about fanfiction nowadays: we've come a long way since the Anne Rice days of terror. But this issue is cropping back up again with BookTok complaining that they can't pay someone else for bound copies of fanfiction. Don't do that either.)

Bottom line, here are the problems with using things like C.AI:

It is using material it doesn't have permission to use and doesn't credit anybody. Not only is it ethically wrong, but AI is already beginning to contend with copyright issues.

C.AI sucks at its job anyway. It's not good at basic story structure like building tension, and can't even remember things you've told it. I've also seen many instances of bots saying triggering or disgusting things that deeply upset the user. You don't get that with properly trigger tagged fanworks.

Your work and your time put into the app can be taken away from you at any moment and used to make money for someone else. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people who use AI panic about accidentally deleting a bot that they spent hours conversing with. Your time and effort is so much more stable and well-preserved if you wrote a fanfiction or roleplayed with someone and saved the chatlogs. The company that owns and runs C.AI can not only use whatever you've written as they see fit, they can take your shit away on a whim, either on purpose or by accident due to the nature of the Internet.

DON'T USE C.AI, OR AT THE VERY BARE MINIMUM DO NOT DO THE AI'S WORK FOR IT BY STEALING OTHER PEOPLES' WORK TO PUT INTO IT. Writing fanfiction is a communal labor of love. We share it with each other for free for the love of the original work and ideas we share. Not only can AI not replicate this, but it shouldn't.

(also, this goes without saying, but this entire post also applies to ai art)

[all-the-fish]

Oh, you know, just the usual internet browsing experience in the year of 2024

Some links and explanations since I figured it might be useful to some people, and writing down stuff is nice.

First of all, get Firefox. Yes, it has apps for Android/iOS too. It allows more extensions and customization (except the iOS version), it tracks less, the company has a less shitty attitude about things. Currently all the other alternatives are variations of Chromium, which means no matter how degoogled they supposedly are, Google has almost a monopoly on web browsing and that's not great. Basically they can introduce extremely user unfriendly updates and there's nothing forcing them to not do it, and nowhere for people to escape to. Current examples of their suggested updates are disabling/severly limiting adblocks in June 2024, and this great suggestion to force sites to verify "web environment integrity" ("oh you don't run a version of chromium we approve, such as the one that runs working adblocks? no web for you.").

uBlockOrigin - barely needs any explanation but yes, it works. You can whitelist whatever you want to support through displaying ads. You can also easily "adblock" site elements that annoy you. "Please log in" notice that won't go away? Important news tm sidebar that gives you sensory overload? Bye.

Dark Reader - a site you use has no dark mode? Now it has. Fairly customizable, also has some basic options for visually impaired people.

SponsorBlock for YouTube - highlights/skips (you choose) sponsored bits in the videos based on user submissions, and a few other things people often skip ("pls like and subscribe!"). A bit more controversial than normal adblock since the creators get some decent money from this, but also a lot of the big sponsors are kinda scummy and offer inferior product for superior price (or try to sell you a star jpg land ownership in Scotland to become a lord), so hearing an ad for that for the 20th time is kinda annoying. But also some creators make their sponsored segments hilarious.

Privacy Badger (and Ghostery I suppose) - I'm not actually sure how needed these are with uBlock and Firefox set to block any tracking it can, but that's basically what it does. Find someone more educated on this topic than me for more info.

Https Everywhere - I... can't actually find the extension anymore, also Firefox has this as an option in its settings now, so this is probably obsolete, whoops.

Facebook Container - also comes with Firefox by default I think. Keeps FB from snooping around outside of FB. It does that a lot, even if you don't have an account.

WebP / Avif image converter - have you ever saved an image and then discovered you can't view it, because it's WebP/Avif? You can now save it as a jpg.

YouTube Search Fixer - have you noticed that youtube search has been even worse than usual lately, with inserting all those unrelated videos into your search results? This fixes that. Also has an option to force shorts to play in the normal video window.

Consent-O-Matic - automatically rejects cookies/gdpr consent forms. While automated, you might still get a second or two of flashing popups being yeeted.

XKit Rewritten - current most up to date "variation "fork" of XKit I think? Has settings in extension settings instead of an extra tumblr button. As long as you get over the new dash layout current tumblr is kinda fine tbh, so this isn't as important as in the past, but still nice. I mostly use it to hide some visual bloat and mark posts on the dash I've already seen.

YouTube NonStop - do you want to punch youtube every time it pauses a video to check if you're still there? This saves your fists.

uBlacklist - blacklists sites from your search results. Obviously has a lot of different uses, but I use it to hide ai generated stuff from image search results. Here's a site list for that.

Redirect AMP to HTML - redirects links from their amp version to the normal version. Amp link is a version of a site made faster and more accessible for phones by Bing/Google. Good in theory, but lets search engines prefer some pages to others (that don't have an amp version), and afaik takes traffic from the original page too. Here's some more reading about why it's an issue, I don't think I can make a good tl;dr on this.

Also since I used this in the tags, here's some reading about enshittification and why the current mainstream internet/services kinda suck.

[cyle]

So what is the threshold in declaring whether this experiment is a mistake or not? Do we need to send feedback in daily? Stop using the site altogether? What will actually be counted vs written off as people not liking change?

when we A/B test something, it means that one group of people has the new thing, and one group of people has the old thing. this youtube video is a very quick way of explaining that process, i suggest watching it first here.

in this case, with the new navigation layout, our hypothesis is that the new layout will be more easily understood by more people, meaning we'll see more engagement with the navigation items themselves. like literally, more clicks to the things we now have labels for, when before they were just an icon. and the fact they're in a place that's become more standard across the internet: a left-aligned sidebar.

ideally, that will lead to better retention of new users, and even an "aha" moment for people who have been on tumblr for a long time but never really looked at those different destinations. i've been on tumblr since 2009 and even i've found myself clicking on the inbox and activity more than ever, with the new change.

for us to see the change as a "mistake", we'd need to see statistical evidence to contradict that hypothesis, which we're already tracking automatically for everyone in the test. we'd also need to get an overwhelming amount of feedback to contradict any positive gains we do see. sending in negative feedback daily won't do that.

so if you want the whole thing to go away: we need to see a negative behavior change in potentially millions of peoples' behavior. that has happened before! we've rolled changes back that caused that negative reaction. that's the whole point of these experiments.

and if you want to send us feedback about how the experience is negatively affecting you: please, please do!!! despite the statistical evidence, we want to know if there are accessibility concerns we missed, usability concerns, design considerations, etc etc, because that's why we're running this as an experiment and not just launching it to everyone. that feedback is really important to us, as long as it's constructive.

[nanamineedstherapy]

Why yo JJK Daddy won't fuck you in his domain

or

Questions We Were Too Afraid to Ask About Gojo's Domain Mid-Fiuck

Q.) Would a normal human suffocate in Gojo’s Infinite Void? Is it a slow death by asphyxiation, or something worse?

Ans.) Okay, picture this: you’re trapped in a space where time, reality, and the very fabric of your sanity start glitching out like a Windows XP error screen. Now ask yourself—would you be thinking about oxygen, or would your brain already be deep-fried beyond recognition? Let’s break it down:

Instant Incapacitation: The moment Infinite Void activates, your brain is force-fed an infinite stream of information. It’s like trying to read every Wikipedia article at once while someone screams quantum physics into your ear. You don’t even get the chance to feel yourself suffocate—because you’re already mentally done before your lungs even remember they exist.

Infinity’s Environmental Control: Gojo controls space at an atomic level, right? If he can stop physical objects but still let oxygen in when fighting, then he’s probably not sealing his Domain like a vacuum chamber. Your lungs might be fine, but your brain? Completely bricked.

Domain Mechanics: Domains are spiritual barriers, not physical ones. While they trap targets, they don’t inherently cut off external airflow unless the user explicitly designs them to (e.g., a water-based Domain). Gojo’s focus is on information overload, not environmental sabotage.

Verdict: You’re not suffocating. You’re getting an eternal brain freeze while Gojo stands there looking pretty. If death had a blue screen of death, this would be it.

TDLR: You die, but not from lack of air. You die because your brain is sent to the fifth dimension against its will long before suffocating can become an issue.

Q.) What if he's like having sexy times with his wife and he like you know…. arrives at the station and accidently activates it then would she suffocate????

Ans.) Picture the surreal horror of an intimate moment shattered by cosmic miscalculation. Even in this absurd scenario, suffocation remains unlikely. Here’s why:

Activation Demands Total Focus: Gojo’s Infinite Void requires hand signs and chanting. If he’s “arriving at the station” mid-sexy-time, his brain is probably focused on… other priorities. Domain Expansions demand intense concentration—hard to pull off when you’re, uh, distracted. Or, Infinite Void isn’t a button you can hit by accident. It requires precise hand signs and an unwavering focus—a mental state that’s nearly impossible to maintain when you're caught in a passionate embrace. Your mind is split between desire and duty, and the latter simply can’t be achieved halfway. Or, Infinite Void isn’t a sneeze; it’s a full-on hand-sign-chanting-mind-focus event. If he’s “arriving at the station,” his brain is, let’s just say… preoccupied. And last I checked, you need at least some mental bandwidth to activate a Domain Expansion.

Even If It Happens (Somehow, Someway)-Infinity’s Autopilot: Even if he somehow activated it, his Limitless technique subconsciously filters threats. Air molecules = allowed. Suffocation = blocked. The Domain’s true purpose is to flood the target’s consciousness with overwhelming data, not to create a suffocating prison. His wife would still get oxygen—just also get a front-row seat to the cosmos screaming into her brain. Or, Gojo’s Infinity is basically his body's automatic firewall. If it filters poison gas, it sure as hell filters air molecules. His wife isn’t suffocating—she’s just getting front-row seats to cosmic horror at 4K resolution. Imagine mid-sex and suddenly, BAM—the entire universe starts whispering forbidden knowledge into your skull.

The Real Danger-Instant Neural Shutdown: Instead of a slow demise by lack of air, the person caught in the void would experience a rapid collapse of their mental faculties. Imagine an instantaneous, existential blue-screen of death—where your brain is the system crashing, not your lungs giving out. Or, she wouldn’t be gasping for air. She’d be locked in place, her mind thrown into a spiraling existential meltdown while Gojo panics, like, “Oh shit, wrong expansion—”

Gojo Would Shut That Shit Down IMMEDIATELY: Domains burn a ton of energy—he’d collapse it within seconds, realizing his mistake (and probably screaming in horror). Then he’d spend the next 72 hours groveling with limited-edition crepes and emergency foot rubs.

Verdict: So, while the headcanon is as wild as it is darkly humorous, the outcome isn’t a suffocation scenario. It’s a catastrophic, instantaneous mental overload—a cosmic “oops” that leaves you with nothing but a shattered psyche. So just trauma and a very awkward conversation with Shoko later.

TDLR: You know how you need to focus to get the optimal velocity in bed? It’s the same for him. He’s either focusing on the sex or the Domain—he can’t do both. (I know all men do is lie. SMH. Men right.)

And for this reason alone, NONE of your JJK Dads/Moms are fucking you in their Domains.

…Except maybe Takaba. But only if you’re funny enough. And even then, you’ll never know if he’s laughing with you or at you.

PS: These deductions are based on watching everything way too closely. If you disagree, let’s argue—after all, the void is infinite, and so are our headcanons.

Double PS, read comments. There's more deep discussion going on.

[felassan]

John Epler in the BioWare Discord (August 7th, again) -

User: "Since the dialogue wheel is coming back, will our choices set our Rook as diplomatic/humorous/aggressive with varying tone and voice lines similar to Hawke being able to be blue/purple/red?" John: "Not to the same degree - we want to give you the freedom to play your Rook differently depending on who they're talking to (you might be kinder to your companions and brusque with authority figures, for example), but your tone choices will have an impact within a conversation and, sometimes, with specific characters across multiple conversations." --- User: "I have to ask: how muscular can we make the elves?" John: "Reasonably so. You won't be making any massive bodybuilders but like... Timothy Olyphant?" User: "As a follow up what about humans and qunari? Quite muscular a la arnold or big viking type? Or not so much that lvl?" John: "Larger lineages (Qunari, esp) are bigger by default so the upper bounds are going to be bigger, but for modeling and animation we did want to put some limits on it. But your Rook can look pretty reasonably muscled, regardless of lineage choice." --- User: "Are there any time-sensitive quests (in terms of gameplay time, that will fail automatically if not addressed in a timely manner), and if there are please tell me they're at least indicated as such in some way?" John: "There are quests that can go away and technically 'fail' if you don't address them - but, to be VERY clear, this is not an in-game timer, but rather as you progress the game's story forward. That said, we do try to sign post them as much as possible." --- User: "Does Rook ever get the choice to cuss?" John: "Yes. You'll know when you're doing it, and we leave it up to you to make the choice, but sometimes, cursing is exactly what the situation demands."

[character limit text break!]

User: "Does the bioware team read the other channels and if so do they think we're unhinged or endearing?" John: "Little of column A, little of column B. But I mean, I've been online for 27 years, the internet has ruined me as much as anyone." --- User: "all the Rooks we've seen so far are wearing purple, please tell me we dont have to wear purple" John: "Everyone else can wear whatever colour they want but you, specifically, must always wear purple." --- User: "All the games have had unique faction symbols for our protagonist (Warden, Champion of Kirkwall, Inquisition) I assume there will be one for the Veilguard Will the symbol for it get released before the game or is this something that will be revealed in-game/after it’s launched?" John: "Every faction has their own symbol - including the Veilguard themselves! You may have noticed it in some of the art out there." --- John: "As a general comment - one thing I want to be super clear on - even as creative director there are things I can say, and things we're not ready to talk about. I'd rather spend my time answering what I can instead of a dozen 'sorry I can't talk about that yet' - especially since this channel is on slow mode." --- User: "There are blood effects in combat after Rook hits an enemy. And I think a developer shared images of the blood effects on hit after the reveal. Will characters be covered in blood or other environmental effects? Like getting wet from walking in puddles or muddy from running on dirt?" John: "There are environmental effects that persist on characters, depending on the environment you're traversing. They're subtle, but they're there!" --- User: "how many tattoos can we choose from? are there also full bodied ones too?" John: "I don't know the exact number, but there are quite a few. Some are full body as well, though you have control over colours and opacity on a more granular basis."

[character limit text break!]

User: "Of the zones/areas revealed what was the most challenging to design?" John: "Each has its own unique challenges. Arlathan seems simple because - well, it's a forest, right? But what about Arlathan makes it different than places you've been before? How does it fit into the established lore? Minrathous is a different kettle of fish because we've talked about it extensively and in a way that meant it HAD to be grander and more impressive than anything we've built before, which can be a tall order. The team did a fantastic job on all the areas, though." --- User: "which faction has the best fashion, in your opinion?" John: "Crows. Largely because 'black leather and feathers' isn't a look I could pull off in the real world but I am glad my Rook can." --- John: "Alright folks. I've gotta head back to work, but please keep asking questions and I'll answer what I can as soon as I can!"

[source: the official BioWare Discord]

There was also this question and answer:

User: "Can we name our saves like in Origins?" John: "I had to double check because I was about 95% sure on the answer, but also, I've been on this project for its entirety and sometimes I remember features that we had to cut (or never actually built) - yes. You can name your saves to reduce confusion."

but the answer may have now been deleted.

[fluffywing-e-tarot]

Twins of Seperat Paths: Awakened Demon

Shen Yuan Gasped as he dug himself out of the grave. Shen Shi had died, this meant Yuan could reclaim his name.

“ He lives.” His now (demon parent) Huwang jun, Hu FuZhu said. His glowing eyes and Huadian illuminating the night. Shen Yuan could see the fox tails swaying behind the Huwang-Jun. He wasn't hiding himself. Shen Yuan remembered that this demon was the one who powered up the Yao Core Seed.

“Will this one be a Fox?” Shen Yuan said. Trying to get used to the new sensations his body was giving him.

“That's hard to say,” Huwang-Jun said. Contemplation on his face. “ I just got you to eat a yao core seed. You, my little Shi, very well might have died.”

“Then what am I?” Shen Yuan wondered. If the Yao Seed needed Yin energy to activate. Wouldn't it make sense there would be descendents of the same Yao type?

“Let's get you something to eat.” Huwang Jun said. “That might help us figure out what you are.”

Shen Yuan‘s stomach growls. Considering his previous nutrition and becoming a Demon. Shen Yuan is not surprised. It's an hour of shoving, small wrapped leaves under his nose. To finger out what is palatable. As apparently something that wasn't mentioned anywhere in Proud immortal Demon Way demons have a Wide pallet. As average demons go, however, something like two Carnivores won't have the same nutritional benefits as each other. One could benefit from a mummified corpse while a different one can eat cooked meats. 

What smelled the best to him was some sort of tofu bun that looked to have a whole bunch of herbs in it.

“A Yí Qíng.” Huwang Jun said, handing over the bun.

“ an Empath?” Shen Yuan said “ uh how do you know that?”

“Well what are you eating? Right now is a Yí Qíng supplement. When you're in a dry season. Basically, it's a combination of plants that cause specific heightened emotions. Anger and sadness, as I understand.”

“But how do I eat it?”

The dame fox demon shrugs. “This demon would not know. This lord eats flesh.”

“There are many things that you need to be taught. Demons do not under any circumstance shun you for your food pallet.” Hu Fuzhu said. "We fight all the same. Food should be no different."

Shen Yuan had a very strong opinion on that. as he remembers many times where Luo Binghe was served Rotten food as delicacy by a Demon house. He has written rants on the sheer offence Luo Binghe should have had at being served Garbage; he was the Emperor of the realms. In addition to the best Cook ever. “Do you eat rotten food?”

“By human standards, I suppose Demons do. Demons use Yin energy in our cultivation. Humans' foods contain more Yang energy, so it is easier to process for them." Hu Fuzhu said. "Us Demons need Yin in our food.”

That's right, Shen Yuan wasn't Human anymore. Humans where the other now.

“With that little dilemma out of the way, what should this lord call you?”

“Shen Yuan.” Shen Yuan said automatically. He wanted his name back already.

“Shi-er keeping your clan name? We can't have that.” The Fox Lord said, sarcasm and disappointment in his affectionate use of the name he got shackles too. “No you are a son of Huwang Jun. Your new name is Hu Yuanshi.”

It's not like he had a choice. The demon could literally pull him limb from limb. Hu Yuanshi, it was for a courtesy, at least. He would still be Shen Yuan to himself.

Shen Yuan stopped as a *ping!* Was heard. The blue screen of the System greeted him.

[CONGRATULATIONS! CONGRATULATIONS! CONGRATULATIONS! Important things must be said three times.]

[User 002 completed DIE, BUT SURVIVE Special User Quest!]

[B-Points earned +200]

Shen Yuan growled. Years of Slavery in the Qui household. Then, he became a Demon for 200 points. He was alive, at least.

[Evaluating Potential Character Growth For Hu Yuanshi (Shen Shi)]

[ Compleated! New Quest PRINCE OF THE FOX CLAN]

Well, he's a new character in this world. A fresh Demon. Did he just set his life to hard mode?

Original Post

Next Post: Shen Shi

Previous Post: Yao Core Seed

[dailyfigures]

Welcome to the Official DailyFigures Bootleg Spotting Guide™!!!!

here are the steps that i like to use! each step does have exceptions so just keep going down the list until you're 100% sure!

1. where are you buying the figure?

if you're buying from a trusted figure store there is no need to worry. sites like amiami, solaris, nin-nin game, hobby search, ninoma, crunchyroll store, etc. do not sell bootlegs. if you're buying from ebay or similar sites, amazon, an individual seller, a local store, etc. you need to be a little more careful. 

ebay/yahoo auctions/other large scale marketplaces sometimes put something in the description to clarify it's a bootleg, however the word "clarify" is generous; it's just enough so you can't sue them but vague enough that you might still fall for it. watch out for anything that's worded like "china variant", "overseas version", "reproduction", "copy", etc.

also don't make the mistake of assuming irl stores won't sell bootlegs, or are automatically legit or know what they're talking about because they're a physical store; this does not have to be the case! some of the most horrendous biggest bootleg memes have been spotted in irl figure/anime stores, they can and will sell bootlegs so beware!

2. does the figure have a bootleg?

not every figure has a bootleg made of it! check myfigurecollection to make sure.

example ;

rapunzel miku has a bootleg, better check well before buying! vampire miku doesn't have a bootleg (yet?), you're good to go! it is technically possibly you're the first person to discover a new bootleg, so it's always good to keep going down the list to make sure!

3. is the figure ridiculously cheap?

if the figure is extremely cheap for no apparent reason, it's probably a bootleg.

example ; 

this is a bootleg. no one in their right mind would pay 150 bucks for a real figure and sell it for 8.

4. is the figure being sold from china?

almost all bootlegs (apart from people reselling their bootlegs) are produced and sold in china. obviously there are real collectors selling real figures living in china too so there are exceptions, but i'd be careful if you're inexperienced.

example ;

almost all the bootleg sellers on ebay are located in china.

5. how are the seller's reviews?

if it's an individual seller you can ask them for proof of past sales. if it's a reseller website like ebay you can check the reviews on their profile. some bootleg sellers use bots to give themselves overly positive reviews. be wary of accounts with a lot of sales and somehow 100% positive reviews!

example ;

this ebay seller sells bootlegs and has 100% positive reviews.

6. how do the pictures of the figure look?

there's 3 options ;

☆ the figure looks like an obvious bootleg in the picture (unsure how to tell? we'll get to that!) -> it's a bootleg.

☆ the seller only uses the official promotional pics and none of their own -> suspicious. there's no way to visually check the figure so this is very risky.

☆ the figure looks good in the pictures that the seller took -> either this is good news OR the seller stole these pictures from someone else and will send you a bootleg. a red flag is using pics with bad quality and multiple different backgrounds/lighting (they stole the pictures from multiple different people). make sure to reverse image search their pictures!

7. how do you recognise a bootleg just from looking at it?

let's say you're looking at an ad and maybe the lighting is a little vague so you're just not fully sure whether the figure looks right or not. here's what we do!

1. get a picture of a bootleg of the figure in question which you can find on myfigurecollection (figure page -> pictures -> bootlegs).

2. get a picture of the real figure, preferably a user picture since promotional pics can look a little better than the real product. (figure page -> pictures -> figures).

3. pick some details that are clearly different between the original and the bootleg.

4. get a picture from the ad you're unsure about. check the details you've just picked. does it match the bootleg or the real figure? there we go!

example ;

these are user pictures of a real miku figure and a bootleg where i circled the differences i picked. in this case; the way her hair flows, the direction the pink flowers grow in and the length of the stem of the yellow rose.

here are two pictures i found in two different ads of this figure. i circles the differences i picked; the first pic has long straighter hair, pink flowers growing to the left direction and a yellow rose with longer stem. this is real! the right pic has shorter curled up hair, pink flowers growing straight down and a yellow rose with a very short stem. this is a bootleg!

8. does the figure come with a box?

bootlegs often come without box, or with a box that has a different design on it than the official box.

it's not neccesarily suspicious if a figure doesn't come with a box, but it is suspicious if a seller is selling a lot of figures without a box. it's also a big red flag if it's a preorder the seller states it'll be without box; all official figures are produced with box so this is not possible.

if it does have a box, compare it to the official box! find a picture of the official box on myfigurecollection (figure page -> pictures -> loots&boxes) and compare it to the figure listing you're looking at.

sometimes bootleg companies just completely make something up, like this; the official box vs a bootleg box vs another bootleg box. easy to tell the difference this way!

sometimes it's not as easy; here's another official box vs a bootleg box. see the difference? the little 5th anniversary logo on the bottom right is missing!

this has exceptions; sometimes the box looks the exact same, like this official figure vs the bootleg. in this case you will have to use on of the other steps on this list (if you're wondering; the way to tell here is that in the official they took care to package the fragile motor accessories seperately in the blister, instead of on her body like in the bootleg).

thank you for reading my guide!!! i am by no means an expert, these are just the steps i like to use myself and i am absolutely open to suggestions and questions! :) if you're really struggling with a possible bootleg case, you can always send me a message/ask and i'll take a look!

edit; thanks for the suggestions in the comments/reblogs! i appreciate you guys' advice and added it into the guide!!! :)

[dengswei]

your gifsets are perfect, I'm always in awe of what you can do and you're creativity!!! Could you please explain how you made the broken glass gif with different gif in it on photopea? https://www.tumblr.com/dengswei/754916132337729536/userdramas-creator-bingo-green-asiandramanet?source=share and would it be possible to do something similar with other shapes? Thank you for your lovely creations <33

heyy thanks so much!! and of course! i have to admit the way i do it might be a little bit tedious compared to like everyone else (though i don't know how photoshop users or other photopea users might do it 🤣) okay this is gonna end up being so long because of the way i do it so i'm sorry about that and i hope it makes sense 😭

okay i have to admit i couldn't find the texture i've seen people use for the shattered glass effect so i actually used a photopea default brush from this pack

to download the brush set go to window -> plugins -> brush and then search for wall cracks brush (it's literally the only wall related brush set in photopea so it'll show up the moment you download it)

so for the gif i did above i did my giffing the usual way of creating & colouring for different gifs seperatly and then adding them all to one project (it doesn't have to be 4 gifs i just chose 4 because that's what i wanted to show in this gif)

i've done this twice once for this set and another time for this the blood of youth set and i have to say the most important part of this is keep multiple versions of the brush in the position you want as you can so once you've used it to test it out and you like that version keep it because unless you can manage to position the brush in the exact same place every time you're gonna need to reference those (or even use the magic wand tool for it later) and also you need to keep at least a white on black background version for the outline

in the brush pack the one i used was this one: (3564, crack b 9)

for this part i just say play around with both positioning and sizing of the brush, it automatically opens with the size 3000+ which is fine i think with the tushan jing one (the green gif above) i stuck with that size and just kept clicking around until i got the positioning i wanted (this is another reason why i said what i said in the paragraph above because if the brush size is bigger than 1000 it's doesn't come out in the exact positioning as you expect it too

i decide the positioning of the gifs on the way i like the brick brush looking rather than the other way around, this is the positioning i went with if you're curious & would like to use it if that's easier 🤣

you'll need to keep this as a seperate layer at the top, i had it set to screen and then added a colour fill layer clipped on later so that i had the outline for when i was masking

so to start off i have the base gif which i do nothing to, that stays as it is, with the brush layer above set to screen

next is where you want to position your other gifs it may benefit to figure this out all at first before doing any of the masking so you know which parts you want to erase and which parts you want to keep

so this is what i decided with my positioning looking at where each of the cracks are

now comes the tedious part, in some ways the way i do this is a lot similar to how i do grid but it's not as easy (for grid photopea automatically locks onto the squares making it easier to mask, here you have to do it all manually)

first put a raster mask on all of the other gifs except for the base gif & use the magic wand tool on the brush layer so you get the outline of the brush and you mask that away from your gif (so if you turned off the brush layer it should look a little something like this: (it's not perfect but it won't matter that much because you should have the original turned on at the end anyway) (you don't have to do this step tbh i just did it because i thought it looked better)

so with the brush layer turned on you can use that as a template to which parts of the cracks you want to erase, you can either use the magic wand or the paint brush tool it really depends on how much of a perfectionist you are and whether or not the sharp edges bother you (plus some of the cracks have small openings so it might erase another part you don't want if you use the magic wand tool so it really is another instance of playing around and seeing what you like, and it might also change once you add the other gifs too)

so this is how it looks after i've done that (notice in the middle you can still see the edge of the gif? that won't matter because one of the other 2 gifs i still have yet to mask will cover that) & just repeat the same thing for the other gifs you want to add

this is how my masking folders look if you're curious

& last but not least i added a green colour fill layer clipped to the brush layer and set that to darken to get the green effect (make sure that the brush layer is still set to screen)

& once you've merged all of the gifs together you should get your desired outcome like the gif above (make sure that all the gifs have the same amount of frames too)

when it comes to other shapes i'm sure you can! like i did a tutorial with the grid version here, i guess it'll just be a lot of trial and error & finding a texture or brush with different shapes to try it out with kinda like how i did with both versions of this (i definitely did it a lot better this time around compared to the first version i did of this)

hopefully this wasn't too long or too confusing, if anything is please feel free to ask me again and i'll try and explain it a little better 🤣

[ofstormsandfire]

so. I happen to like linux. I'll probably be sticking with it for the foreseeable future myself, and I'll happily recommend it to my friends. this is, however, with the caveat that far too many of my fellow linux users are FUCKING ASSHOLES that seem to consider not automatically knowing everything there is to know about an entirely new operating system to somehow be a moral failing.

if you're the sort of fuck that thinks using a specific operating system—ANY operating system, for the record, I don't care if it's one of the billion distros of linux or windows or macos or some other thing I don't know about—somehow makes you better than others? go fuck yourself up the ass with a rusty baseball bat, and I hope you're not up on your tetanus shots.

and if you're the sort of person who has been considering switching to linux? I am so sorry. you will need patience first and bullshit tolerance second, because it is starting to seem like I know a grand total of three linux users who aren't elitist fucks about it. I introduced one of them to linux and the other introduced me to linux.

get a friend who won't be an elitist fuck about it to help you, okay? I can offer basic advice but I'm no professional, I'm just stubborn and know the right things to google and grew up with a dad who is similarly stubborn if with a much lower tolerance for bullshit these days.

but on a more serious note, now that I've gotten the insults out of the way: there's a reason that linux has the reputation it has. there's a reason why people see it as inaccessible and hard to use. and it's because the community actively pushes people out.

I think I've got one more insult in me: fuck you.

[wandaluvstacos]

I am begging people to stop buying this damn sewing machine for anyone older than 12.

As a toy for children, it's acceptable. If you ACTUALLY want to sew something, do not get a cheap piece of crap from Walmart for $35!! You'll work on this thing for 15 minutes, it will suck, you will get frustrated, and then you'll tell yourself that you are simply incapable of sewing and that it's too complicated for you. But it's not your fault-- you are working with a child's toy. That's like giving up on driving a car because your Barbie Jeep's battery dies the first 5 minutes you're in it.

My two recommendations:

First and most recommended: You get a LIGHTLY USED modern plastic machine for cheap off Facebook Marketplace or your local sewing machine repair shop. I'm talking less than 10 years old. You ask the seller "do you use this regularly" or "has this been serviced". Try to buy from someone who has used the machine recently because they'll know its ins-and-outs. You can find a modern machine for like $30 on Facebook Marketplace from someone who has actually used it (I would not recommend Goodwill or anywhere you can't speak to the person who used it before you, if you are just starting out). One highly recommended modern machine for beginners is the Singer Heavy Duty.

It's $200 new but you can easily find one much cheaper used. It's simple to use and will hold up to basic sewing for the time it will take you to decide whether you want to sew or not. Other modern Singers suck ass; save yourself the trouble. Go with the Singer Heavy Duty or a Brother, or even a Janome if you can find one cheap enough. Stay away from anything that's not a time-trusted brand.

The Brother CS6000i is a decent beginner's machine.

Again, do not buy machines off eBay unless they make it CLEAR that it has been fully serviced and is in perfect working condition. They honestly aren't much cheaper used on eBay than they are new, so best to buy it from someone on Facebook Marketplace or at a sewing machine repair place.

Second recommendation: Buy a VINTAGE METAL machine that has been fully serviced or in perfect working condition. These are more difficult to find serviced, so I wouldn't recommend it unless you find one on FB Marketplace (though the one I got on eBay worked perfectly out of the box). There will be TONS of very cheap vintage machines on FB Marketplace, but the problem with these is that they've often been sitting in a cabinet for 20 years, unused. Not great for learning on. You can also buy one of these machines and have it serviced, but having a machine serviced will cost more than the machine is worth, more often than not.

There are benefits to a vintage metal machine over a modern plastic one. it will last your lifetime. It can sew through thick, difficult fabrics. They're much better looking imo. They likely won't break unless you drop them down a stairwell. However, the oldest ones only do a straight stitch, and speaking as someone who has vintage and a modern machine... the automatic buttonholer and overlock stitch are nice to have! But the vast majority of the stitching you will do will only be zig zag (for stretch knits/elastic) or straight stitch. The zig zag feature became available in most domestic sewing machines by the late 1950s.

Any vintage machine made before 1970 will be fine to sew with; everything was pretty good quality back then. 1970s era Kenmores are ugly and basic but they are cheap while also being excellent machines, and they're the "newest" domestic machine you can get that's still all metal.

Any Singer will have easy-to-replace parts, have easily findable user manuals, and every sewing machine repairman will be able to fix them. The uglier ones in the 1960s are dirt cheap, if you make sure it's not younger than the 628 or 337. Both of these machines are the cheapest vintage all-metal Singers you'll find and they work fine (and they do zig zag stitches).

Do NOT get a Touch n Sew or Stylist made in the late 1960s or later. Generally if it has plastic buttons, it's got something plastic inside (not always, but with Singers, often). These Golden Touch n Sews are in fact Touch n Throw (away).

Any old black machine will be fine and very simple to use, and I think they look gorgeous, but they only straight stitch, so you won't be able to sew your own leggings on them. If you only want to make curtains, quilts, or bags or something, they will work fantastic for that. Just make sure they're serviced, as these things usually are not.

I'm going to talk to my younger, beginner self: Just because it's a used, older machine does not make it worse!

Even used modern plastic machines can work fine. It's rare that people are selling a machine as WORKING when it doesn't work. People tend to be honest about it. Usually they are selling it because they lost interest, it was given to them by a family member, or they just don't use it enough to keep around. Buying used is almost always the best, cheapest option for a beginner. Stop buying these cheapo gadgets on Amazon! They will only make you hate sewing machines.

[andmaybegayer]

Hi, I'm back again with more computer questions: just two. The first is, is it possible to code a program in such a way that it can never be ported to a particular system architecture, even if the code is open source (i.e. if you attempt a port it won't work by design without significant work-arounds and sacrifices; my brain says no but I don't know for sure)? The second is, how do you feel about Apple, and their whole system of stuff? These two questions are totally unrelated. 100%. Promise.

In general, not really, because the capabilities of modern computers very closely approximate Turing machines and any code you can run on a Turing machine can be run on any other Turing machine.

The Turing machine is an abstract model for computation, a hypothetical machine with a long "tape" of editable symbols for memory and the ability to read, write, and make decisions about what and where it reads and writes based on the contents of the tape. If you ever hear someone say that Magic the Gathering or coconut crabs or whatever is a general purpose computer, it's because they've found some way to implement the basic rules of a Turing machine in that system.

Turing machines are the highest tier of the hierarchy of computing (pushdown automata, finite state machines, and basic logic being the successive lower tiers), there's things they can't do (see: the Halting problem) but they are capable of running any arbitrary algorithm. Even in the worst case scenario you could always fall back to implementing any computation that a computer can do as a Turing style computation on the computer's memory. The ideal turing machine has infinite memory but that's really the only way in which real computers differ fundamentally.

Now that's not to say you can't make it hard. Architecture specific features can make porting code nontrivial if that code was designed around secret or obscure features that would first have to be reverse-engineered before you can write a port, or otherwise a pain in the ass, think the PlayStation 3's Cell processor, which had both some weird but otherwise straightforward PowerPC cores plus a bunch of "Synergistic Processing Elements" which were a unique lightweight core designed for high throughput of vector operations on floating point calculations at the expense of being able to do basically anything else.

As a simpler example, when I was running the SwiftSim smooth particle hydrodynamics package it was designed specifically around the particular cache architecture of Skylake-era Intel Scalable CPU's, and was written so that a particular vendor's compiler optimizations would automatically convert some very long loops into shockingly fast cache-optimal vector operations. If you ran that code on a contemporary AMD system you'd lose more than 50% performance core for core because of the differences in cache architecture, and you'd have to rewrite significant portions of the code to retune it for a different architecture to claw back those performance losses.

But yeah if all you care about is "can this computation be implemented eventually" the answer is you can implement any algorithm on Habbo Hotel.

As for Apple? I don't really know enough to say much as a user, my main point of contact was owning an iPad 3rd gen for 10 years and I liked it, really solid tablet, kept going until the certs expired and it couldn't connect to the web.

Their marketing as not spying on you is kind of true but kind of not, they don't do as much as they could to prevent spying, but they do push back in a few places. They don't make their money on ad-sales as much as other companies so their incentives look different and they lean in on some things.

There was a time I thought that Apple had the UI mandate of heaven but that has long since gone, they've become very form over function and they don't design UI's well anymore, leaning into low-contrast, obscure interfaces that are difficult to understand without a detailed tutorial and which require a lot more memorization from their users. There's a lot of examples of this but most obviously, I've never seen anyone truly internalize which side of the screen you have to pull down on for which drawer on an iPhone, and I still see frequent iOS users struggle with the gesture UI because Apple hates the idea of "going back".

Apple's biggest strength is that they usually won't sell you something actively bad, even if they sell you something overpriced. The closest they got with selling you something bad was the iPhone SE which was really suffering with the old screen and camera but they've updated the SE now. People bitch about the Intel macbooks and they're not wrong but even they had redeeming features that made them at least not completely trash. They have sometimes sold you something actively bad but they do it a lot less than other companies.

The hardware performance of the Apple ARM processors is really quite impressive. Everyone else has been playing catch-up for the past few years and it seems like AMD is almost there now. It really was a huge kick in the rear for the mobile PC industry, which had for a long time just kind of accepted that laptops only had long battery life if you didn't do anything with them.

The Apple Magic Mouse is such an interesting example of the design philosophy. Why is the charging port on the bottom? Well at some level Apple understands users, they know that given the choice anxious users will not trust in the battery life of their devices and they will leave a mouse plugged in all the time, which will look and feel bad, so they put the charging port in a location that literally renders it useless and make you understand that if you charge it for a few minutes you can work all day. At the same time the ergonomics are trash because they want it to be a small and slim thing that aligns with their design language and they know that the people who want other mice will just go get them and deal with the limitations.

Apple ecosystem integration seems really good. It's one of those things where I've put a lot of work into getting halfway there and the seamlessness and speed with which things like airdrop/airplay and the phone/mac link work are just so smooth. It's good! I am eternally jealous of whatever the unified mDNS/specification stuff Apple is doing under the hood to allow you to Just Blast Data at a huge array of devices and have them make sense of it. My cheap-ass TV has never once accepted a ScreenCast from my Google Pixel but every iPhone that has ever tried to cast to it has worked flawlessly.

[magicalgirlmindcrank]

Legit not tryna drum up drama but whats your beef with demilypyro? I follow you both but i guees not for long enough to be in the know.

We have beef with Demily like iHop has steak. Yeah it's on the menu, but we're no porterhouse. That said-

She has awful takes about pretty much everything from games to social issues, suffers extreme pick-me-ism, is like two steps away from being an open transmedicalist, and she's just extremely annoying. She seemingly can't go a month without saying some offensive shit about her fellow transwomen or letting her dutch upbringing show. Whenever people bring up that she did or said something shitty she hides behind her autism even when it's not relevant and wouldn't excuse it if it was. Or in case of her saying something racist again, her grandfather being Moroccan or whatever, so she's technically poc so it's automatically fine. Just ignore the fact she's speaking over Black and Latin American people who have actually grown up as such.

On top of it all she often weaponizes her follower base, getting them to attack anyone who is unlucky enough to talk about shitty things she's done somewhere she sees. I won't mention their names, but users have gotten dogpiled and sent death threats cuz of her. She's just immensely toxic and is almost categorically allergic to growing as a person.

None of this is even getting into specific shitty things Demily has done, like making fun of the looks of other transwomen calling them 'it' and such, or her saying passing makes her better at being trans than a transwoman who doesn't pass, or the most recent thing where she puts a transgirl hook up on blast for having ED saying it's gross.

There's funnier trans streamers on this site who don't suck. There's funnier trans vtubers on this site who don't suck.

[momo-de-avis]

first world problems is that about a year ago or so I think it was android in general decided that an absolutely brilliant ideal was to, whenever you change your wallpaper on your phone, it automatically picks an average colour and every single google app is now of that colour, and even more brilliant, absolutely genius, nobel level of intelligent, is that this is a feature you cannot turn off, you are stuck with an absolute eye sore forever. now 90% of my day and job is looking at my email and google calendar, so for the past year I have been trying to find ways to fight this shit because having my entire phone a soft maroon colour grates my nerves in a way very few things in life do and the rage I feel every time my stupid phone forces me to have the absolute dankiest, most horrifying colour scheme there's just a flame inside my chest of pure rage. back then, i google this shit and everyone was upset but now we're living through that horrifying realisation that since this inescapable, we've stockholm syndromed ourselves into pretending this is a good thing and whenever I google ways to bypass this shit, I instead find dumbass mfs saying "you know what, you are wrong, this is a good thing, you must get used to" meanwhile I would like to present a cactus up your ass cause there's also very few things I hate more in life than sorry ass losers who say "get used to it". in the meantime I've found an app that manages to bypass this and you can create your colour scheme so your phone doesn't annoy the fuck out of you, problem is, the app is managed by an absolute buffoon, like the rudest piece of the dankiest shit, and everyone, literally you search the app and you look up user feedback anywhere, this moleman comes out of any hole and will insult anyone who won't praise the ground he walks on, it could just be "hey it isn't working for me X and Y happens" and this piece of shit will emerge out of a cave to say "thats your fault you didnt read the FAQ" and in the meantime I want whoever came up with this idea of forcing my eyes to have one colour scheme I never wanted when my FUCKING JOB IS TO LOOK AT GOOGLE CALENDAR EVERY SINGLE DAY to die of diarrhea because it is the stupidest shit in the world and I NEED SOMEONE to tell me that I am right that they understand me because I feel like that dude when the emperor was naked

[skyfallscotland]

Just a heads up on the AI situation, apparently their bot did scrape archive-locked works, their code is capable of that, so don't worry about restricting your works to users with accounts because it won't do a thing 🙃

The original scraper uploaded the code he used to the internet so anyone who wants to can also scrape the archive and I've seen people say they've got it set up to automatically scrape any new fic as it's uploaded.

These people lack any respect or moral compass and they can and will continue until they get what they want. I don't believe there's any stopping them, so we just have to make the best of it and come together in comfort, knowing that all their learning models will teach is omegaverse wing-play. I hope they enjoy it!

[latimeria-fell-from-heaven]

Do you have any writer suggestions that write arknights smut? It’s so hard to find arknight writers on here ur literally carrying the fandom rn😩😩

the one person that comes to mind is @hime-bee!! she doesn't post her fics on here though; they're all over on her ao3, and they're all super duper yummy!!٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و ♡ i think my first fic of hers was either her mr. nothing or the silverash one, but ohhhhh my god was it an experience!! please go check her out, her fics are so good and she's super cool <33

another ao3 user that i like is marahuyos, and it was their 'hello, my summer!' fic that was among the first arknights fics that i read. and they also wrote for reverse 1999, which is an automatic win in my books, i love joe and horrorpedia (,,>ヮ<,,)!

thelastwitch is also a good one too, and i adored their executor smut fic to bits!! i love the way they characterized executor in this one and how he would handle intimacy of any kind. plus the extra at the end made me giggle,,

while they only have two fics for arknights, hypaalicious is another one i like to go back to. the silverash one is funny bc they wondered where the heck the fandom got that "continue the bloodline" idea from, but they just rolled with it and made a smut fic. and also im eternally down bad for flamebringer, so i go feral whenever i re-read their fic about him <33

sensou_wa_aserazu hasn't published another fic since early 2020, but i like to go back and re-read the two they have anyways ৻( •̀ ᗜ •́ ৻) though a bit of a warning ig, but the women have dicks in their fics. i know that won't be everyone's cup of tea, but i know a few of you goobers will be into that, so have at it.

edit: omg im so sorry but i have someone who briefly wrote for arknights on tumblr!!

@/jiraiburger has written a bit for arknights as well!! they reuploaded their old content but its still available for viewing!!

phantom and lee nsfw hcs. lumen and courier flirting. scaly tail thirst.

[canmom]

Hypothetical Decentralised Social Media Protocol Stack

if we were to dream up the Next Social Media from first principles we face three problems. one is scaling hosting, the second is discovery/aggregation, the third is moderation.

hosting

hosting for millions of users is very very expensive. you have to have a network of datacentres around the world and mechanisms to sync the data between them. you probably use something like AWS, and they will charge you an eye-watering amount of money for it. since it's so expensive, there's no way to break even except by either charging users to access your service (which people generally hate to do) or selling ads, the ability to intrude on their attention to the highest bidder (which people also hate, and go out of their way to filter out). unless you have a lot of money to burn, this is a major barrier.

the traditional internet hosts everything on different servers, and you use addresses that point you to that server. the problem with this is that it responds poorly to sudden spikes in attention. if you self-host your blog, you can get DDOSed entirely by accident. you can use a service like cloudflare to protect you but that's $$$. you can host a blog on a service like wordpress, or a static site on a service like Github Pages or Neocities, often for free, but that broadly limits interaction to people leaving comments on your blog and doesn't have the off-the-cuff passing-thought sort of interaction that social media does.

the middle ground is forums, which used to be the primary form of social interaction before social media eclipsed them, typically running on one or a few servers with a database + frontend. these are viable enough, often they can be run with fairly minimal ads or by user subscriptions (the SomethingAwful model), but they can't scale indefinitely, and each one is a separate bubble. mastodon is a semi-return to this model, with the addition of a means to use your account on one bubble to interact with another ('federation').

the issue with everything so far is that it's an all-eggs-in-one-basket approach. you depend on the forum, instance, or service paying its bills to stay up. if it goes down, it's just gone. and database-backend models often interact poorly with the internet archive's scraping, so huge chunks won't be preserved.

scaling hosting could theoretically be solved by a model like torrents or IPFS, in which every user becomes a 'server' for all the posts they download, and you look up files using hashes of the content. if a post gets popular, it also gets better seeded! an issue with that design is archival: there is no guarantee that stuff will stay on the network, so if nobody is downloading a post, it is likely to get flushed out by newer stuff. it's like link rot, but it happens automatically.

IPFS solves this by 'pinning': you order an IPFS node (e.g. your server) not to flush a certain file so it will always be available from at least one source. they've sadly mixed this up in cryptocurrency, with 'pinning services' which will take payment in crypto to pin your data. my distaste for a technology designed around red queen races aside, I don't know how pinning costs compare to regular hosting costs.

theoretically you could build a social network on a backbone of content-based addressing. it would come with some drawbacks (posts would be immutable, unless you use some indirection to a traditional address-based hosting) but i think you could make it work (a mix of location-based addressing for low-bandwidth stuff like text, and content-based addressing for inline media). in fact, IPFS has the ability to mix in a bit of address-based lookup into its content-based approach, used for hosting blogs and the like.

as for videos - well, BitTorrent is great for distributing video files. though I don't know how well that scales to something like Youtube. you'd need a lot of hard drive space to handle the amount of Youtube that people typically watch and continue seeding it.

aggregation/discovery

the next problem is aggregation/discovery. social media sites approach this problem in various ways. early social media sites like LiveJournal had a somewhat newsgroup-like approach, you'd join a 'community' and people would post stuff to that community. this got replaced by the subscription model of sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where every user is simultaneously an author and a curator, and you subscribe to someone to see what posts they want to share.

this in turn got replaced by neural network-driven algorithms which attempt to guess what you'll want to see and show you stuff that's popular with whatever it thinks your demographic is. that's gotta go, or at least not be an intrinsic part of the social network anymore.

it would be easy enough to replicate the 'subscribe to see someone's recommended stuff' model, you just need a protocol for pointing people at stuff. (getting analytics such as like/reblog counts would be more difficult!) it would probably look similar to RSS feeds: you upload a list of suitably formatted data, and programs which speak that protocol can download it.

the problem of discovery - ways to find strangers who are interested in the same stuff you are - is more tricky. if we're trying to design this as a fully decentralised, censorship-resistant network, we face the spam problem. any means you use to broadcast 'hi, i exist and i like to talk about this thing, come interact with me' can be subverted by spammers. either you restrict yourself entirely to spreading across a network of curated recommendations, or you have to have moderation.

moderation

moderation is one of the hardest problems of social networks as they currently exist. it's both a problem of spam (the posts that users want to see getting swamped by porn bots or whatever) and legality (they're obliged to remove child porn, beheading videos and the like). the usual solution is a combination of AI shit - does the robot think this looks like a naked person - and outsourcing it to poorly paid workers in (typically) African countries, whose job is to look at reports of the most traumatic shit humans can come up with all day and confirm whether it's bad or not.

for our purposes, the hypothetical decentralised network is a protocol to help computers find stuff, not a platform. we can't control how people use it, and if we're not hosting any of the bad shit, it's not on us. but spam moderation is a problem any time that people can insert content you did not request into your feed.

possibly this is where you could have something like Mastodon instances, with their own moderation rules, but crucially, which don't host the content they aggregate. so instead of having 'an account on an instance', you have a stable address on the network, and you submit it to various directories so people can find you. by keeping each one limited in scale, it makes moderation more feasible. this is basically Reddit's model: you have topic-based hubs which people can subscribe to, and submit stuff to.

the other moderation issue is that there is no mechanism in this design to protect from mass harassment. if someone put you on the K*w*f*rms List of Degenerate Trannies To Suicidebait, there'd be fuck all you can do except refuse to receive contact from strangers. though... that's kind of already true of the internet as it stands. nobody has solved this problem.

to sum up

primarily static sites 'hosted' partly or fully on IPFS and BitTorrent

a protocol for sharing content you want to promote, similar to RSS, that you can aggregate into a 'feed'

directories you can submit posts to which handle their own moderation

no ads, nobody makes money off this

honestly, the biggest problem with all this is mostly just... getting it going in the first place. because let's be real, who but tech nerds is going to use a system that requires you to understand fuckin IPFS? until it's already up and running, this idea's got about as much hope as getting people to sign each others' GPG keys. it would have to have the sharp edges sanded down, so it's as easy to get on the Hypothetical Decentralised Social Network Protocol Stack as it is to register an account on tumblr.

but running over it like this... I don't think it's actually impossible in principle. a lot of the technical hurdles have already been solved. and that's what I want the Next Place to look like.