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<h1>The death of Kiwi Farms doesn't mean the end of free speech</h1>
<p>published: 2022-08-28</p>
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<p>My female readers, have you ever menstruated so hard that you butterfly-effect caused the downfall of one of the Internet's most notorious forums? One trash bin begets another, it seems.</p>
<p>A few days ago, Kiwi Farms went down because of another DDoS. I won't recount all of the details of what went down here because it's a tangled mess of disinformation on the mainstream news, trans-identified males making hormones to illegally disseminate to minors, and a long-running game of hot potato with Internet service providers. The important part is that, on the <a href="https://archive.ph/TvUnw#selection-107.1-107.362">downtime update page</a> that currently makes up the entire website, "Jersh" wrote the following:</p>
<blockquote>The mob has already planned subsequent targets. Should we stay down, they will then attack 'gender critical' communities - especially those ran by and for women. No place can exist online which allows criticism of their fetishistic lifestyle, and nothing would excite them more than this power and domination struggle being inflicted on a female space instead.</blockquote>
<p>This has naturally whipped <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220828155002/https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/146668/owner-of-kiwifarms-releases-a-statement-on-the-downtime">the users of Ovarit into a frenzy</a> of wondering if they are next should Kiwi Farms be taken down, given that their site falls into the aforementioned category of "gender critical" and there have been (pitiful, but existent) <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220828155724/https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/126029/tra-redditor-plans-to-infiltrate-ovarit">attempts to "infiltrate" it in the past</a>. Most of Ovarit's praise of Kiwi Farms centers around the collection of "receipts" (screenshots and other proof) of trans-identified individuals preying on minors and sexually harassing other members of society, with the occasional remembering of the racism, sexism, and other "-isms" rampant elsewhere on the site. I mean, hell, one only needs to listen to <em>literally any</em> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220826125050/https://madattheinternet.com/">episode of the admin's podcast</a> to hear <em>plenty</em> of examples of why no self-respecting user of Ovarit (or anywhere, really) should touch Kiwi Farms with a ten-foot pole.</p>
<p>Personally, I am not concerned about a potential death of Kiwi Farms or that it would impact "free speech" on the internet for two reasons:</p>
<ol><li>Joshua Moon, the admin of Kiwi Farms, has promised ad nauseam that, if Kiwi Farms were ever to go down permanently, he would zip the whole site up into a torrent and distribute it.</li></ol>
<p>This would involve somehow flattening the database of XenForo (the current forum software Kiwi Farms runs, although they were in the process of moving to a different one developed by the admin) into static HTML pages. This solves the whole concern about, if Kiwi Farms disappears from the Internet, all the "receipts" and archives gathered on the site would disappear as well. Of course, this depends on Mr. Moon both keeping his promise and having the time and resources to be able to do this... which may not happen in the case of legal action happening against the site.</p>
<ol start="2"><li><strong>You all remember Tor exists, right?</strong></li></ol>
<p>I wrote <a href="../may/divide.html">a post earlier this year</a> where I analyzed <em>all</em> the sites indexed by the <a href="http://juhanurmihxlp77nkq76byazcldy2hlmovfu2epvl5ankdibsot4csyd.onion">Tor search engine Ahmia</a> and found that a great deal of them were illegal pornography sites. One would think that this would be a major cause of concern for law enforcement, and yet police <a href="https://archive.ph/vl72O">don't seem able to mobilize fast enough</a>. (Not that I'm advocating for an increase in law enforcement power...) While <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220828162805/https://www.zdnet.com/article/tor-project-to-fix-bug-used-for-ddos-attacks-on-onion-sites-for-years/">DDoS attacks against Tor</a> hidden services are still possible, so long as the admin takes pains to make themselves anonymous, the fact that hidden services cannot be easily, if at all, traced back to their hosting point of origin would negate many of the ways that Kiwi Farms has gone down over the years, mainly by bad actors contacting their hosting/domain providers and demanding that they drop the forum as a customer. Because <code>.onion</code> domains are not bought but instead generated by cryptography, there is no domain to be revoked and no financial penalty for switching to a new one should the Tor Project ever develop the ability to wholesale blacklist hidden services from being resolved on the network.</p>
<p>If one forum on the Internet dies, it does not logically follow that all free speech everywhere is suddenly revoked. I've seen mountains of evidence otherwise with my own eyes in the course of putting together <a href="https://letsdecentralize.org/rollcall/tor.html">Let's Decentralize</a>. <em>Plenty</em> of sites that would immediately get nuked on the clearnet reside happily (well, as happy as hate-filled sites can be) and without issues on the darknet. So if you're truly worried about not being able to share receipts of predators without facing legal or physical threats from said predators, <a href="https://letsdecentralize.org/setup.html">learn how to host a site on the darknet</a>. Use Tor. Use I2P. Use Freenet if you can't afford keeping a computer online 24/7. Hell, even use ZeroNet in a VM if you have to. <strong>You have options</strong>, and lying down and crying about "muh freeze peach" and giving up is <em>not</em> a productive one.</p>
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<blockquote>All space becomes male space unless females maintain a concerted effort to mark a space for themselves.<br>- Sheila Jeffreys</blockquote>
<p>For a long <em>long</em> time I have wished for a female-only lowercase-I internet. Even just a darknet, an overlay network a la Yggdrasil, a place no man could ever traverse. (Of course, it would be difficult without some kind of centralization to verify that only females are accessing the network, but this post is not concerned with implementation details.) A place without the cruft and scum and constant fighting for recognition of my worth as a person that defines the male-dominated Internet. From what I have seen of the few spaces like this on the clearnet I have found, I can extrapolate what this new network would look like: far less (maybe even no) pornography being spammed everywhere, less needless software complexity in the name of "dick-swinging" to pad out one's programming portfolio or resume, less soulless corporatist minimalism, fewer threats of violence, less harassment (sexual or otherwise), less SEO spam and blog chum... kinder interactions, more vibrant personality on personal websites...</p>
<p>Less energy spent "proving" my worth as a (physically) human being.</p>
<p>As far as socializing with strangers online goes, I have within the past few months taken up refuge in Ovarit (and ThePinkPill when the former doesn't have an appropriate "circle" for what I want to post or when said thing has already been posted but the discussion is dead and archived). In the process, I have discovered that <strong>I don't hate social media, I'm just tired of interacting with men.</strong> I have literally never had an argument on Ovarit in my time there. Plenty of disagreements and differences in opinion, sure, but no actual <em>fights</em> in the same way I did on an obscure forum in June when some "moid" was insultingly dismissive of my anxiety over the fall of <em>Roe v. Wade</em>. All my interactions on Ovarit have been respectful, if not warm and friendly and supportive. The archetypal social media user who only logs on to stir up shit and be a contrarian has a hard time taking root, quickly banned as a troll uninterested in arguing in good faith or contributing to a productive conversation. The women there (and maybe outside, if I were brave enough to share some of my writing away from the keyboard) just seem to understand my writing in a way that men appear to be fundamentally incapable of: the latter maybe a few key concepts here and there, but rarely, if ever, in its complex totality.</p>
<p>As far as socializing with strangers online goes, I have within the past few months taken up refuge in Ovarit (and ThePinkPill when the former doesn't have an appropriate "circle" for what I want to post or when said thing has already been posted but the discussion is dead and archived). In the process, I have discovered that <strong>I don't hate social media, I'm just tired of interacting with men.</strong> <del>I have literally never had an argument on Ovarit in my time there.</del> Plenty of disagreements and differences in opinion, sure, but no actual <em>fights</em> in the same way I did on an obscure forum in June when some "moid" was insultingly dismissive of my anxiety over the fall of <em>Roe v. Wade</em>. (Almost) all my interactions on Ovarit have been respectful, if not warm and friendly and supportive. (<b>EDIT 2022-08-27: I've had <em>one</em> person call me "condescending" when I asked them to explain why I should have empathy for men. Fortunately the site has a block button.</b>) The archetypal social media user who only logs on to stir up shit and be a contrarian has a hard time taking root, quickly banned as a troll uninterested in arguing in good faith or contributing to a productive conversation. The women there (and maybe outside, if I were brave enough to share some of my writing away from the keyboard) just seem to understand my writing in a way that men appear to be fundamentally incapable of: the latter maybe a few key concepts here and there, but rarely, if ever, in its complex totality.</p>
<p>It's funny the respect among users that naturally forms when you're surrounded by people who have already implicitly agreed on the value of your life and your words and your <em>personhood</em>.</p>
<p>Despite it being a public website, I feel safe there in a way I haven't felt online in a long time. It is the same overwhelming feeling of sudden safety oft documented by women entering womyn's festivals for the first time (I think specifically of <a href="ipfs://QmUT6pjdhn6tC3GD1am64TAzpoqPD7hmjbG8hBGncyTkaY"><em>The Disappearing L</em> by Bonnie J. Morris</a>) and every time thereafter. Being in an environment of all women when one has been living in the world of men all their lives, suddenly cognizant of the male voyeur implanted in their brains since birth demanding they stay "pretty" and "consumable" all the time and how utterly useless it is there. It fills me with sorrow and yet hope at the same time: hopeful because the safety and camaraderie and solidarity expressed in the journals and snippets within prove that female separatist micro-societies <em>can</em> in fact function without men, sorrowful because many of them were shuttered before I came out and ever knew of them, but hopeful again because what once was can be yet again - and <em>is</em>, now, today, in many places throughout the world.</p>
<p>What levels of freedom can I not even conceive of because of the weight of misogyny I've carried all my life? What does a truly liberated female who has never known male-caused violence, male-caused sexualization, male-caused <em>dehumanization</em> look like?</p>

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# MayVaneDay ASS (https://tilde.town/~dzwdz/ass/) feed
2022-08-28 https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/august/kiwi.html The death of Kiwi Farms doesn't mean the end of free speech
2022-08-17 https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/august/beres.html I uninstalled my RSS feed reader
2022-08-06 https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/august/urbit.html Urbit is still basically just a glorified chatroom
2022-08-01 https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/august/separatism-redux.html Separatism: Redux

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<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/feed.xml" rel="self" />
<link href="https://mayvaneday.org" />
<id>https://mayvaneday.org/feed.xml</id>
<icon>https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count?p=/feed.xml</icon>
<logo>https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count?p=/feed.xml</logo>
<author>
<name>Vane Vander</name>
<email>vanevander@mayvaneday.org</email>
</author>
<entry>
<title>The death of Kiwi Farms doesn't mean the end of free speech</title>
<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/august/kiwi.html" />
<id>https://mayvaneday.org/</id>
<published>2022-08-28</published>
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
<p>My female readers, have you ever menstruated so hard that you butterfly-effect caused the downfall of one of the Internet's most notorious forums? One trash bin begets another, it seems.</p>
<p>A few days ago, Kiwi Farms went down because of another DDoS. I won't recount all of the details of what went down here because it's a tangled mess of disinformation on the mainstream news, trans-identified males making hormones to illegally disseminate to minors, and a long-running game of hot potato with Internet service providers. The important part is that, on the <a href="https://archive.ph/TvUnw#selection-107.1-107.362">downtime update page</a> that currently makes up the entire website, "Jersh" wrote the following:</p>
<blockquote>The mob has already planned subsequent targets. Should we stay down, they will then attack 'gender critical' communities - especially those ran by and for women. No place can exist online which allows criticism of their fetishistic lifestyle, and nothing would excite them more than this power and domination struggle being inflicted on a female space instead.</blockquote>
<p>This has naturally whipped <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220828155002/https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/146668/owner-of-kiwifarms-releases-a-statement-on-the-downtime">the users of Ovarit into a frenzy</a> of wondering if they are next should Kiwi Farms be taken down, given that their site falls into the aforementioned category of "gender critical" and there have been (pitiful, but existent) <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220828155724/https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/126029/tra-redditor-plans-to-infiltrate-ovarit">attempts to "infiltrate" it in the past</a>. Most of Ovarit's praise of Kiwi Farms centers around the collection of "receipts" (screenshots and other proof) of trans-identified individuals preying on minors and sexually harassing other members of society, with the occasional remembering of the racism, sexism, and other "-isms" rampant elsewhere on the site. I mean, hell, one only needs to listen to <em>literally any</em> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220826125050/https://madattheinternet.com/">episode of the admin's podcast</a> to hear <em>plenty</em> of examples of why no self-respecting user of Ovarit (or anywhere, really) should touch Kiwi Farms with a ten-foot pole.</p>
<p>Personally, I am not concerned about a potential death of Kiwi Farms or that it would impact "free speech" on the internet for two reasons:</p>
<ol><li>Joshua Moon, the admin of Kiwi Farms, has promised ad nauseam that, if Kiwi Farms were ever to go down permanently, he would zip the whole site up into a torrent and distribute it.</li></ol>
<p>This would involve somehow flattening the database of XenForo (the current forum software Kiwi Farms runs, although they were in the process of moving to a different one developed by the admin) into static HTML pages. This solves the whole concern about, if Kiwi Farms disappears from the Internet, all the "receipts" and archives gathered on the site would disappear as well. Of course, this depends on Mr. Moon both keeping his promise and having the time and resources to be able to do this... which may not happen in the case of legal action happening against the site.</p>
<ol start="2"><li><strong>You all remember Tor exists, right?</strong></li></ol>
<p>I wrote <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/may/divide.html">a post earlier this year</a> where I analyzed <em>all</em> the sites indexed by the <a href="http://juhanurmihxlp77nkq76byazcldy2hlmovfu2epvl5ankdibsot4csyd.onion">Tor search engine Ahmia</a> and found that a great deal of them were illegal pornography sites. One would think that this would be a major cause of concern for law enforcement, and yet police <a href="https://archive.ph/vl72O">don't seem able to mobilize fast enough</a>. (Not that I'm advocating for an increase in law enforcement power...) While <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220828162805/https://www.zdnet.com/article/tor-project-to-fix-bug-used-for-ddos-attacks-on-onion-sites-for-years/">DDoS attacks against Tor</a> hidden services are still possible, so long as the admin takes pains to make themselves anonymous, the fact that hidden services cannot be easily, if at all, traced back to their hosting point of origin would negate many of the ways that Kiwi Farms has gone down over the years, mainly by bad actors contacting their hosting/domain providers and demanding that they drop the forum as a customer. Because <code>.onion</code> domains are not bought but instead generated by cryptography, there is no domain to be revoked and no financial penalty for switching to a new one should the Tor Project ever develop the ability to wholesale blacklist hidden services from being resolved on the network.</p>
<p>If one forum on the Internet dies, it does not logically follow that all free speech everywhere is suddenly revoked. I've seen mountains of evidence otherwise with my own eyes in the course of putting together <a href="https://letsdecentralize.org/rollcall/tor.html">Let's Decentralize</a>. <em>Plenty</em> of sites that would immediately get nuked on the clearnet reside happily (well, as happy as hate-filled sites can be) and without issues on the darknet. So if you're truly worried about not being able to share receipts of predators without facing legal or physical threats from said predators, <a href="https://letsdecentralize.org/setup.html">learn how to host a site on the darknet</a>. Use Tor. Use I2P. Use Freenet if you can't afford keeping a computer online 24/7. Hell, even use ZeroNet in a VM if you have to. <strong>You have options</strong>, and lying down and crying about "muh freeze peach" and giving up is <em>not</em> a productive one.</p>
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<title>I uninstalled my RSS feed reader</title>
<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/august/beres.html" />
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<entry>
<title>Broke Dumbass Attempts To Web3</title>
<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/july/web3.html" />
<id>https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/july/web3.html</id>
<published>2022-07-07</published>
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<p>I have successfully managed to <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/few/">microwave my brain</a>. Spending forty-plus hours squeezed into a single month on a project you wanted to make for several years and then getting into it and finding out it's just tedious data entry all the way down will do that to you. Doing not much of anything else, writing or making art or even going outside, has made me go animalistic and crazy to the tune of an <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706215822/https://readykids.com.au/oral-fixation/">oral fixation</a> of gnawing on chunks of wood stolen from the organics waste bin at the side of the house. Not the greatest idea I've ever had. Hopefully "start working on a new book of poetry" will be a better one once the mental fog starts to lift. I hope this isn't what remote work will feel like once I <em>do</em> get a job.</p>
<p>Speaking of excessive technology use driving people batshit insane, I had a dream last night where a bunch of techbros had forced me to stand in front of a tribunal and explain why Let's Decentralize doesn't cover web3 projects. Neither my argument nor theirs made any sense, being a dream and all, but I remember "your shit is obtuse and doesn't make any sense to a layperson" not being taken for an answer. But since at least two people have emailed me asking if I could shill their crypto projects and the only response I've pulled out so far is "I don't do free labor", I decided that I would spend today (yesterday, if you're reading this on the day of publication) actually researching web3 so I can have an actual concrete argument when the tribunal <em>does</em> come.</p>
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<h2>Filecoin</h2>
<p>Filecoin was the first web3 project that came to mind. I mean, it has the name "file" in it! So one would think that the whole point would be to host files online. And what is a website other than a pile of files?</p>
<p>Since I was already familiar with IPFS, which Filecoin is apparently built off of, I thought that setting up a Filecoin node would be as simple as compiling and installing the IPFS node is. Apparently not. The <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706204229/https://filecoin.io/">main website</a> felt janky and broken with a "loading experience" spinner than just spun forever, and the homepage displayed little to no relevant information other than a glorified version of "we store files", which one could already guess from the name. Going to "Build" and then "View Filecoin storage tutorials" gave an <a href="https://archive.ph/lNC80">IPFS resolving error.</a> <!-- https://docs.filecoin.io/build/examples/ -->
Digging on an external search engine turned up the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706174435/https://github.com/filecoin-project/lotus">GitHub for the Lotus daemon</a>, which allows one to interact with the Filecoin blockchain, but the "getting started" documentation at the end of the page <a href="https://archive.ph/hAQls">also 404ed</a> with an IPFS error. Because what you truly want to see when researching if a new technology is trustworthy or not is to see it crashing and burning at every turn.</p>
<p>Strangely, a different link to the documentation was on the sidebar. "Surely we're getting <em>somewhere</em>," I wondered. "Not even <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706205526/https://medium.com/coinmonks/how-to-add-site-to-ipfs-and-ipns-f121b4cfc8ee">figuring out IPNS</a> took this long."</p>
<p>If the destination was "imagining myself slamming my fists into my keyboard", then sure, we got somewhere.</p>
<p>The Lotus daemon has <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706174251/https://lotus.filecoin.io/storage-providers/get-started/hardware-requirements/">absolutely ridiculous hardware requirements</a>: it would cost more to acquire 128 GB of RAM and the energy to power that than I'd ever earn with Filecoin, assuming I was ever in it to earn anything and didn't just want another mirror for my website. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706174952/https://lotus.filecoin.io/lotus/install/prerequisites/#minimal-requirements">Lite nodes are slightly better</a>, but still way higher than anything I have: my VPS has only 8 GB, and my desktop has 16, and there's no way I'm running a bandwidth-intensive application like this from my home connection or paying more for a beefy VPS from Contabo when it would all just get sucked up by a single application. Besides, it wouldn't even work for long: the chain grows at approximately 38 GB every day. With the storage my current VPS has, I'd be out of disk space in <em>four days</em>!</p>
<p>What seems to be common for web3 projects is that, if one doesn't want to run a node or doesn't have the resources to do so, the only way to interact with the network is by <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706174735/https://docs.filecoin.io/build/get-started/">interfacing with a third-party API</a>, which kind of defeats the point of "decentralization" if my only method of access is forever mediated by someone else.</p>
<p>So Filecoin is out.</p>
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<h2>Siacoin / Skynet</h2>
<p>I did not go in with high hopes. My first introduction to Siacoin and its associated projects was <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220618073628/https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet">a huge callout post</a> warning about how shoddy and, as we zoomers say, "sus" the development team is. I <em>strongly</em> urge anyone considering going into web3 to read through that post, even if not going to Siacoin per se, since many of the arguments about monetization and faux-decentralization will carry over into anything web3-related.</p>
<p>Despite this, I was still willing to give Skynet a try. I mean, it bills itself as <a href="https://archive.ph/NaIEU#selection-723.10-723.99">"a collection of cryptographic protocols for storing and retrieving data over the Internet."</a> <!-- https://blog.sia.tech/a-deep-dive-into-skynet-a0fa037feea -->
What is a website if not a collection of retrievable files over the Internet? Nothing in that definition explicitly excludes websites, even if web3 seems to be mainly comprised of a bunch of shoddy Node.js webapps.</p>
<p>This time, mainly due to the influence of the callout post, I went on a little tour of the community first before getting into the documentation. I wanted to test the waters, to see the typical userbase of Skynet, to judge the competence of those who I would be trusting with my data. After all, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706210602/https://web3isgoinggreat.com/">web3 has quite the reputation for scams and money laundering and general financial incompetence.</a> Given that I am currently unemployed and dependent on the goodwill of my parents to have a roof over my head and food in my stomach, I don't exactly have the "disposable" income to be burning it for the purposes of playing with "magical Internet money".</p>
<p>I should have expected less than nothing.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="https://mayvaneday.org/img/siacoiners.jpg" alt="meme of man on a bus reading a book titled 'why Siacoiners deserve less'" title="meme of man on a bus reading a book titled 'why Siacoiners deserve less'" /></p>
<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706191825/https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/">One of the example apps</a> is <em>clearly</em> written by competent developers I can trust with my private files. "Always make soure, you're logged in!" Yeah, I'll make "soure"... to stay away from cloud storage that's effectively a black box concerning where my sensitive data goes.</p>
<p>One of the top posts in the subreddit is <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706193750/https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/6ygt94/sia_usb_drive_with_unlimited_space/">a "meme" about a USB stick that uses Siacoin for umlimited storage</a>. The "meme" (in quotes because the only humor value is in how half-baked the ideas within are) claims it would require "no installing" and "no need to understand crypto". Only about one or two commenters stopped sucking the OP off for long enough to realize that such a device would require a persistent Internet connection and enough crypto knowledge to get a Sia wallet set up to actually buy whatever storage space ends up getting used and also for drivers to be preinstalled on every operating system in existence in order to require no installation of additional software and to appear just like any other flash drive.</p>
<p>The rest of the subreddit is just the standard crypto whining about Binance/Coinbase trading and praising the main devs for the "new Internet" they have supposedly created.</p>
<p>So what if I want to actually <em>access</em> and <em>host</em> content on Skynet? You know, the reason we're here?</p>
<p>With IPFS, I just have a node on my computer running on localhost port 8082 (yours may differ) that exposes a web UI I can use to view and download content. My website is set up to use DNSLink, so you can just throw the <a href="https://ipfs.letsdecentralize.org/ipns/mayvaneday.org">regular domain into any IPFS portal</a>, whether local or hosted by someone else. For people without domains, they can still use IPNS (which allows for updating content at the same hash), just by distributing the hash itself instead of linking it to a domain name. All of this can be done from a computer I already own that is powerful enough to run an IPFS node, which I've been able to successfully do from a toaster with 2 GB of RAM and a 100 GB hard drive shared among the whole operating system, <em>far</em> lower than <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706201617/https://portal-docs.skynetlabs.com/prerequisites/hosting-provider">the requirements for a Skynet portal</a>.</p>
<p>Skynet also has portals, which allow for free viewing of content... but unlike IPFS, where I can just run <code>ipfs add -r /path/to/content</code> and get a hash I can then throw into <code>ipfs name publish MYEXTREMELYLONGHASHHERE</code>, the design of Siacoin mandates that one pays for the storage space one uses. Prices are set by each individual portal, but portals often offer an extremely restricted free tier, which just throws those without money back into the sharecropping paradigm. And if a portal goes down, both free and paid users <a href="https://archive.ph/dR2nU#selection-663.1-663.658">lose control of all their data on said portal</a>. One could run their own portal to avoid shutdowns, but that <a href="https://archive.ph/h4xv4#selection-1439.0-1439.40">costs money beyond</a><!-- https://portal-docs.skynetlabs.com/prerequisites/requirements -->
the initial expense of the hardware and bandwidth and electricity to get a server in the first place.</p>
<p>Oopsies, looks like you need money to participate after all!</p>
<p>And also you apparently <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706201903/https://portal-docs.skynetlabs.com/prerequisites/secrets-management">need a LastPass account</a>. A centralized <em>proprietary</em> service to set up a decentralized Internet? (No, a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706202300/https://github.com/lastpass/lastpass-cli">CLI client</a> does not count.) Sia is <em>clearly</em> run by clowns.</p>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="box">
<h2>Arweave</h2>
<p>By this point I was ready for the post to be done. But still I persisted. Surely there must be <em>something</em> out there other than IPFS that won't demand access to my money?</p>
<p>Arweave seemed promising at first, but the second tab on their <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706213514/https://www.reddit.com/r/Arweave/top/?t=year">subreddit's header</a> says "Get free tokens now", implying that tokens actually cost money. Under the tab next to it, "Technical", there is supposedly information about hosting content on the Arweave network, but it 404s.</p>
<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210613044935/https://docs.arweave.org/developers/tools/arweave-deploy">After retrieving a saved copy of the deploy page from the Wayback Machine</a>, I installed the NPM package used to deploy files... and failed, since the tool required a keyfile and, for whatever reason, <em>that</em> command wasn't listed first. After generating said keyfile, I tried again... and got an error about insufficient balance. As expected. But hey, at least I tried. And didn't have to buy a supercomputer to do so.</p>
<p><code>sudo npm uninstall -g arweave-deploy</code>, and into the trash bin it goes.</p>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="box">
<p align="center"><img src="https://mayvaneday.org/img/NO_THIRD_PARTIES.jpg" alt="deep-fried meme of man screaming surrounded by various web3 company logos" alt="deep-fried meme of man screaming surrounded by various web3 company logos" /></p>
<p><strong>If the whole point of web3 is to decentralize everything, then I don't want to use third parties to host my website!</strong> I want to host my own stuff without needing a supercomputer or a persistent connection or static IP address!</p>
<p>As far as serverless hosting goes, we already have Freenet and the gazillion ZeroNet forks and whatever Beaker Browser is using nowadays and IPFS, the latter of which works just fine without the gazillion "blockchain domain" scams. In fact, since most of these web3 projects are built off IPFS anyway, why go through a middleman? Because these projects incentivize people to host your shit? If the content is popular enough, there doesn't need to be a profit motive for your content to stay alive and be well-propagated; it'll just happen naturally.</p>
<p>How are low-income and other disenfranchised people supposed to participate in web3 without just becoming sharecroppers all over again? With the profit motive, and since storage space is limited, nodes have an incentive to seed anything a wealthy person wants and give the leftover scraps of storage and bandwidth, if any are left, to the "free" users. If microtransactions are required to view anything, then how is a person with little to no "disposable" income supposed to discover new content they may like? (Of course, <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/december/copywrong.html">a counter-economy of non-commercial content sans paywalls may very well rise up in response.</a>)</p>
<blockquote><p>I say: let them. Let them lock down their works so tightly that they become utterly inaccessible. Let them miss out on the money they would have earned from now-disgruntled customers. Let the corporations destroy themselves in building a dam to maximize every dollar flowing to them only to find their river is drying up.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I wish that web3 evangelists would realize that the average layperson doesn't give a shit about decentralization in the computing sense. They don't care about making their files as accessible as possible, just to themselves. To them, Google Drive or OneDrive or whatever other cloud storage services are in vogue are plenty good enough for them. They would rather see ads and sharecrop on centralized social media platforms than open their wallets to pay for an inferior service. And of those with the technological expertise to operate one of these nodes if we <em>really</em> wanted to, well... <em>I</em> know that <em>I</em> wouldn't want to live in a world where every interaction with my fellow (physically) human beings is monetized. And I doubt that many others would either. If improving the Internet is the goal, especially on this increasingly fragile planet, replacing the current system with something functionally worse but <a href="https://archive.ph/Xr2Y1">multitudes more energy-intensive</a> <!-- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitcoin-carbon-footprint-electricity.html -->
is not the solution.</p>
</div>
</article>]]>
</summary>
</entry>
</feed>

@ -9,9 +9,9 @@
<!-- tip for future scavengers: use "w3m https://mayvaneday.art/identity/ | gpg --verify" as a one-liner to verify this (you will need to have previously imported the public key, though) -->
<pre>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
Hash: SHA512
as of 2022-05-29:
as of 2022-08-27:
I have full administrative control of the following domains and their subdomains:
- - mayvaneday.art
@ -25,14 +25,14 @@ The following Tor hidden services are mine, and I have sole access to the privat
- - meynethaffeecapsvfphrcnfrx44w2nskgls2juwitibvqctk2plvhqd.onion (MayVaneDay)
- - xanthexikes7btjqlkakrxjf546rze2n4ftnqzth6qk52jdgrf6jwpqd.onion (Let's Decentralize)
- - blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion (Dead End Shrine Online)
- - viridiw3yumwfwcl3nicjjhrog4frxhbn3x67i7hqubxx7ppn3azbxyd.onion (IPFS Gateway 2)
- - viridiw3yumwfwcl3nicjjhrog4frxhbn3x67i7hqubxx7ppn3azbxyd.onion (IPFS Gateway)
- - rowank72uiwwbcc6r553svcaxjgnuvoqugs5a3origaa3bufgwabx2ad.onion (Rowan's Uploads)
The following I2P "eepsites" are mine, and I have sole access to the private keys:
- - zli2qsg54w7y42vgw4xxlnj4nktcpg7xp33yjxkp33sjafvznbwa.b32.i2p (MayVaneDay)
- - mqtlargpv4247iylywxw6ibi6qpz6my5duqm33c4lcdhjg5yfh7q.b32.i2p (Let's Decentralize)
- - 2a55el42cobuxtls7iv6eoimejocybdekwnnaefcn4u2f5eydela.b32.i2p (Dead End Shrine Online)
- - 6lsfe74wnpz77f6e6bt3zvgrroimqwvppv7oyfetilh6lzs74hqa.b32.i2p (IPFS Gateway 2)
- - 6lsfe74wnpz77f6e6bt3zvgrroimqwvppv7oyfetilh6lzs74hqa.b32.i2p (IPFS Gateway)
The following Freenet sites are mine, and I have sole access to the private keys:
- - USK@Up0ipQCQjyY2PaGofU-P63kJMb54E0~2xZiUnyxPypM,rGmJhPDVou6DwS6Eh23sZ93hVbDaA6v4D5l3vWsN-oY,AQACAAE/mayvaneday/-1/ (MayVaneDay)
@ -44,6 +44,8 @@ FOR LEGAL INQUIRIES, EMAIL:
vanevander AT mayvaneday DOT org
FOR BUSINESS INQUIRIES, EMAIL:
lethe AT deadendshrine DOT online
FOR NICE THINGS: EMAIL:
lethe AT beltane DOT email
DO NOT CONTACT ME OTHERWISE FOR ANY OTHER REASON
If you're browsing this site though a Git repository,
@ -98,15 +100,14 @@ Ipzl6ecL3upkGrfo0MVNDVcpFiq1t7kh81pi
- -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
iQFOBAEBCAA4FiEEq2j4OrvQF4SeDEtjVj/VgT2D7rUFAmKTfdsaHHZhbmV2YW5k
ZXJAbWF5dmFuZWRheS5hcnQACgkQVj/VgT2D7rURwQf/fo8eYOsgMpCzp1RVtOa5
p+NdXw2IIjk77O6Y2zTasVYRUV3pEM3Xsx5qEzeY/LrUCsBJQBzAdv+9tsQjgXlE
ocJ9FgTftYMaik9vpyQrwhuN7e1x13jZj/FO6ayJSeIABmSPBhBgBlhB7cpA6X/5
AliYg+aoOi22dX91SNurv9A9C4AWB9a8ytM4fTSRfKxdRBKyJoevpLtWXxmkWkjA
UnvrdRJUSOlFJNFKv0qpaclZtpKsTImcBu0dgExBXFDOCn6EZMS62jWfv+YdkPvk
WSGT+n+q0ExnugtQmXyZsjx0FkZesPMsQNPKe2wXn6dbfPQJNn/yXkKZ7VwPUJKm
ag==
=53cT
iQEzBAEBCgAdFiEEq2j4OrvQF4SeDEtjVj/VgT2D7rUFAmMJfYcACgkQVj/VgT2D
7rVHUQf+KvUYIgAzsDLj1XklVYO7lDQhFhCsPybSsZvEzu77qVCb9lvLW/KuMTVp
t1Osy1QaHNRcImdLlGl6KoA323pQzBUHxrVY1xYwG/LUljpPQgtU1iACABh19hh8
a8DnNgk9eZnsQ37Ws198R+Jzanwd1WfS82zHxmQLeMGLzDFZtDTVLApIcJjc75+U
7ZyX74SmNrhgbUwv32Y0Ry8OfwTaBoajTRlP6wsgTWFTh1iIKpNiofdkkCCIwMnO
+ZFFthqzV67No8+nTuIguO+6GXqqNjcVCCqOELDhkFP0it2paXIOwQB9Sn3tpn6R
H5lHRhl3ml+HptVYYWbS3LlkDjORGQ==
=tvkU
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
</pre>
</body>

@ -44,9 +44,9 @@
<div class="box">
<h3>Announcement Box</h3>
<ul>
<li>2022-08-27: Update to /identity/: there is now an email inbox for if you want to send me some kind words. <em>Kind</em> words, mind you. I still don't want unsolicited criticism or random vitriol.</li>
<li>2022-08-26: <a href="http://127.0.0.1:8888/freenet:USK@pCrelRhrdPLOOOkuO7vazpiv79VPLoH0lMSiztNCDuY,te1mNGpT8LulF945k6Dl-bxIQQjDkD1hteXMc21GgQs,AQACAAE/kill-9/6" title="Freenet link">Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore</a> and <a href="ipfs://Qmcxq8628Ly9vx7Vn5gwSp1GhuDpBYiRBaQodd5LEgTR5X/" title="IPFS link">no aspect of society being at all relevant to women</a>...</li>
<li>2022-08-17: Life is meant to be shared... my website design isn't. Please make something yourself instead of scraping my site wholesale.</li>
<li>2022-08-07: <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/mods/sm4sh_reskin_guide_20220807.pdf">DO YOU</a> <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/mods/lucas_womenrespecter/index.html">RESPECT WOMEN?</a></li>
<li>2022-07-17: You told me to "respect his culture". You told me to respect someone who <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220718022420/http://loureads.com/2020/08/07/lou-reads-189-biblical-gender-roles-and-how-to-follow-them/">[fundamentally sees me as lesser]</a>. These people want me dead. I will not return the favor of respect.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<hr>

@ -48,5 +48,8 @@ Disallow: /
User-agent: DataForSeoBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: SpiderLing
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

@ -14,6 +14,7 @@ Last updated: 2022-07-16
- [Ada Lovelace](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace): the first computer programmer
- [Margaret Hamilton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)): lead programmer on the Apollo project
- [Grace Hopper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper): created the first compiler
- [Susan Kare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Kare): "pioneer of pixel art"; designed many of the icons, fonts, and images for Apple, NeXT, and IBM in the 1980s
- [Hedy Lamarr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Inventor): invented Wi-Fi
## Industry

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