Firstsona: a raccoon dude.

Replaced by: a dragon lady.

Twenty-five years and one gender transition later, she is still my fursona. In the past few years she’s gone from being pitch black to being a starry night sky with blue and purple accents (nsfw), also her tits have generally gotten bigger, her tail’s generally fatter, and she’s often a noodle-dragon.

Sometimes the raccoon still pops up. She’s transitioned too. But dragon’s what sticks.

Nice hat.

Not at all, I am very happy to be able to preemptively keep Terf Fedi and 4Chan Forever Fedi and all those other Fediverse the fuck out of my little corner of Queer Furry Fedi. Throwing everyone into one giant discussion forum and pushing them to fight with each other because that’s what keeps the ad impressions coming is not an experience I care to return to.

Realistically though I can’t be bothered to engage in “fighting about which instance is better to be in” though, I know which one is better for me and if you think that one is a shitty place for you to be then I am pleased to have you stay in whatever place you like as long as you don’t try to make the place I like stop existing or change to fit your desires.

September came for Reddit long, long ago. Personally I stay way the hell off of any popular subreddit because they’re just a total wasteland. And September comes for the small subreddits now and then, too - they’ll grow too big, the active mods get overwhelmed, and it starts to turn into 4chan. And I unsubscribe. If I’m lucky I hear about the mods starting up a new offshoot subreddit that’s trying to be small, relatively quiet, and aggressively unpopular.

I was in college when they started coming out. I have never read any of them.

The last straw for LJ for me was when they made any mention of queerness illegal so as to conform to the laws of their new home country. I logged out and never logged in again. I still get badly-translated email about anniversary gifts for my various 13-year-old accounts now and then.

I have a DW account but it lies fallow, mostly because I could never get the auto-crossposter plugin to work on my Wordpress site.

Oh I’m not saying these putative AI mods would be any better than existing Reddit mods. They’d probably be even more arbitrary and capricious and unappealable, and I sure don’t expect them to be anywhere near fully-trained. But they’d be owned by Reddit, who would now be ⭐️⭐️⭐️AN AI COMPANY⭐️⭐️⭐️, which is the replacement for “the blockchain” as a thing you vaguely mention your company using if you want rich, dumb investors to wet their pants and throw tons of money at you.

The big sites got big by being there when a previous big site died. But nothing lasts forever, and eventually a social site becomes desperately uncool because there are people old enough to have grandkids on it. And they totter on, like a zombie, until they fuck out badly, and most people leave. But not everyone, I still get linked to blog entries on Livejournal now and then, sometimes I even end up on Blogger when I’m following a trail and people are still updating some of those.

I have been running a Mastodon instance since like 2016/17 and this has been quietly happening for the entire time I’ve been on the fediverse. (I can’t check the exact date right now as I’m in the middle of upgrading it.)

Do you want to be in the Anime Girl Who Posts Nazi Memes Fediverse? How about the Queer Furry Fediverse? Or maybe you’d rather be in the Mocking Shitposts Fediverse? Perhaps you want the Everyone Has A Photo Of A Human And Thinks Federating With Facebook’s Activitypub Is Actually A Good Idea Fediverse? Or how about the TERF/Gender-Critical Fediverse? Or the “Standalone” Social Site That Is Actually A Fediverse Instance With Federation Disabled And The Credits Removed In Violation Of The Source License?

Some of these Fediverses will happily talk with others. Some of them will rapidly defederate from others as soon as they encounter a place that clearly belongs to a Fediverse they are incompatible with. Some of them quickly get defederated from the Fediverses they are incompatible with. Some of them look at the #fediblock tag, some to keep aware of places worth pre-emptively blocking to make a chill place to talk, some to look for fellow people who have been cast out of someone else’s chill zones.

My bet? AI.

If they have any kind of archive of past mod decisions then they can just dump all that into a neural net. And then they get to look all sexy in their upcoming IPO because they are using ⭐️⭐️⭐️ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE⭐️⭐️⭐️ like all the ⭐️⭐️⭐️SEXIEST⭐️⭐️⭐️ companies!!!1! No more of those annoying unpaid volunteers to get uppity any more!

I, for one, do not welcome our new AI moderation overlords, and will probably be done with Reddit if this happens. But I just know someone there has to be pushing for this.