Close This World

Sartre famously said "hell is other people", and though this quote is often taken out context, the sentiment most concisely describes the hell that the world descended into starting in the 20th century; humanity is more connected than it has ever been in its entire history, and everything is getting worse. Nearly everyone in the world has the ability to publish multimedia for free¹ on a global distribution network with automatic translation built-in; this is commonly referred to as "the internet", but if put in the context that a mere 30 years ago someone in a third world country experiencing a genocide would be able to publish multimedia documenting the genocide for the world to see, the world today would not only have been thought of as unthinkably futuristic but would also seem glaringly contradictory. How, in an age where an anarchic, egalitarian future has arrived unevenly with the production and distribution of information, are such things able to still happen? How is it that we can see genocide and ecocide being waged by a fascistic police state that has been established by a class of known Molochian pedophiles, all of which is documented in excruciating detail and universally accessible, and yet all of it is able to continue? There is a very obvious contradiction between this state of affairs in which it has become undeniable for anyone who isn't clinically delusional that there is nothing free or just about the world we live in (or at the very least western civilization in particular) and the fact that the billionaire pedocracy masquerading as liberal democracies are nevertheless deciding to push forward with literal 1984(!!1!) mass surveillance while the legacy media all suppresses or puts a spin on all the atrocities that are openly being perpetrated by the Epstein class. Just as kleptocratic imperialist invasions like the Iraq War were done in the name of spreading democracy, so too is the ruling class attempting to decisively bring an end to the golden age of the internet: it's no longer enough to merely centralize nearly all of the internet's traffic to a handful of $$iliKKKon Valley megacorps that essentially function as a privatized surveillance-propaganda apparatus of the police state, now they are going to try to force everyone to hand over their government identification to shitpost.

Whether or not this is a misguided overreach on the part of the ruling class is questionable, but it is worth noting that they have enjoyed a status of nearly unquestioned domination and where any resistance has been disorganized, symbolic, half-assed, unserious, or bursts of a desperate hope that all of this could be resolved by one apocalyptic spontaneous riot. Above all else, what every single one of these forms of rebellion has had over the past 15 years is that they have all been ineffective: every single attempt at resistance has not so much as put the brakes on the literal New World Order that is currently underway and has started the process of liquidating whatever it deems to be an excess population of people. First they will come for the colonial subjects like the Palestinians, then the brown people and trannies, then the middle class white cis gays, then everyone who has ever posted an "orange man bad"-tier shitlib take on the internet. Many others, including Aaron Bushnell (rest in power), have said that what has been happening in Gaza is a preview of the future that the ruling class have deemed will be normal, and it's a common saying among the left that fascism is imperialism turned inwards, but much like conspiracy theories, what were once positions that only communist faggots at the fringes of society like yours truly have advocated for have now become an undeniable reality that is also being documented for us in excruciating detail with responses which have likewise been at best ineffective if not totally unserious lib shit. Even in the most extreme cases like the George Floyd riots, ultimately all of the actions that have been taken over the past 15 years by various movements and bursts of spontaneous action which sought to prevent the apocalypse we're now living through were acting out of misguided good intentions. Whether it be peaceful protests or rioting, ultimately all of these actions are predicated on the assumption that the current ruling class has some claim to legitimacy: they were elected "democratically" after all, or they attained their wealth because the "market" rewarded innovation, so clearly we simply need to participate in these democratic and stochastic processes. Just as it's never been about "spreading democracy", the first assumption is fundamentally false: we do not live under a democracy and at the very least haven't since 9/11, but everyone in the US has been too much of an overfed passive consoomer to care for most of the last 25 years. Yet this has not stopped the billionaire pedocracy from deciding that even the façade of democracy was more than we deserved, and so all the displaced fantasies of totalitarian oppression that have haunted the liberal unconscious in the form of media like 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, and The Man in the High Castle (the TV show, not the book) will now come to pass: even being able to shitpost on the internet will soon be illegal if the regime doesn't like it.

Complimenting this on the market side of the system is a growing class of what was once largely a phenomenon confined to colonial subjects (including Black Americans): a permanently unhireable status, a designated lumpen class who is not the usual reserve of surplus labor under capitalism but instead is simply unfit even for wage slavery. This condition is becoming increasingly the reality for everyone else and functions as a stochastic long-arm of the omnicidal pedocracy: all those who are designated for permanent unemployment will eventually fall through the cracks of "mutual aid" (i.e. charity with a coat of red paint) as the collective wealth of everyone who isn't a billionaire continues to dwindle and the social media surveillance-propaganda platforms with the assistance of LLMs erode all social trust or basic intellectual and emotional competency. One by one more will end up on the streets, people you know on the internet and in real life, maybe at first only the trannies and people who are at the peripheries of your social circles, where they will be purged either by starvation, the increasingly volatile elements of a dying planet's climate in chaos, or more recently will be scooped up by the gestapo and sent to concentration camps. Israel hasn't been genociding Palestinians merely because they want their land, and the Trump regime hasn't been mass deporting and imprisoning brown people merely because they're racists: all of this is setting the stage for what they hope will become the next new normal, where the innermost reality of this terminal stage of liberal-democratic capitalism that has been laid bare for us in recent years – that the billionaire class are the only people in the United States who truly have any citizenship (i.e. a government that works for them) – will start to become materially explicit. Whoever hasn't already finished college, gotten a job, started a career and is probably huddling in their overpriced private equity owned apartment hoping they don't suffer a random setback that puts them out on the street or in debt for life will have no choice but to become various forms of lumpen and precariat: sex workers, grifters, scammers, gig economy workers, professional gamblers, aspiring influencers. Else they will be stuck living with their parents forever until they too lose their homes and jobs. This will take longer, but take it from someone who experienced firsthand in 2008 what happens when the scam that is the American Dream lurches into a crisis: only the millionaires will be protected from immiseration, only the billionaires will continue to live decent lives. Everyone else, even normie middle class people who seem to enjoy lifestyles of comparatively unimaginable stability, will eventually succumb to the inhuman logic of the market because only the working class, even the well-paid working class, is subject to this cruel and capricious god.

I dislike talking about "myself" in blog posts, or in general really; like k-punk, I prefer to think of myself as a space through which inhuman forces outside myself are given a voice. But as the previous section indicates, and as the CCRU itself said, it's often at the periphery that we see the future begin to arrive unevenly; there is a degree to which the lived experiences of being at the fringes of the herd make one's own experiences inherently valuable insofar as the status of being marginalized reduces one to an alienated, abstract object, a fixed idea, that is defined by cultural and academic institutions and enforced by state violence: an identity category. When I transitioned in 2016, I had already been radicalized years before from being extremely online for most of my life back when this wasn't a nearly ubiquitous condition. Back then the internet still felt dangerous; all of the things that you had been told were bad by the mainstream media, by schools, churches, teachers, and parents were readily accessible, and there were all sorts of likeminded aristocratic anarchists in the snake pit who might ruin your life for their own amusement. In this sort of environment, being an omnivorous consumer of information was not an inescapable reality of using the internet but a consciously chosen decision. Nothing makes political extremism, sexual degeneracy, and violence all seem cool as fuck to an impressionable young mind than being told by midwit adults with authority not to look into these scary evil things, and so like many others of my generation being on the internet meant getting away with things. I read a lot of radical propaganda and saw a lot of weird hentai, gore images, and shock sites; I first learned of anarchism, the existence of transsexuals, and the uncanny way that death reduces a person to an inert sack of meat during this liminal space between the transition from web 1.0 to 2.0.

Like many others who were socialized by the internet back when it was still dangerous, it was a refuge for me from a supposedly "real" world. Unlike the stereotype of a loner outcast, I found that it's relatively easy to be popular and charismatic if you are only bold, unapologetic, and funny, but I intentionally chose to be an outcast because I have never been able to connect with anyone or felt like a person; to me, being human has always meant above all else to be a sad ape who chooses to subordinate itself to abstractions, starting at the lowest levels with the herd, and I have never had any patience for it. Through my engagements with anarchism and all things edgy and forbidden I eventually found Stirner and Nietzsche, who have remained constant influences since then, always having a renewed sense of relevancy at each stage in my life, and were my introductions to philosophy. At the time my engagements with Stirner and Nietzsche were very superficial (I was after all a literal teenager), but unlike some other things I read back then (e.g. The Satanic Bible), and even if one only ever engages at a superficial level with these things, it is I think becoming a lost art for the freaks, misfits, and losers to forge an ego in the absence of any ability to outsource their sense of self onto the herd. Everyone should during adolesence or early adulthood pass through a phase of edgy, superficial atheism, egoism, anarchism, Satanism, or Existentialism, because even if it never goes beyond a surface level, even if it's a very sophomoric sort of thing to go through, it is fundamentally a good thing to recognize that each of us is an absolutely unique individual. What has always made me feel so detached from humanity is the enthusiasm with which this sad ape will reject the incredible and constant fact that is available to us at all time for free: each of us, right now, is alive and conscious, able to perceive a world which in the act of perception continually changes the way our brains develop through time in a way that is structurally similar to the universe itself. As much as it may sound like the some cliche hippie bullshit you might hear from someone who has done too much acid, this is the meaning of a phrase that is at the foundations of western esotericism: "As above, so below." Each of us is absolutely unique because each of us is a universe of complexity and possibility unto ourselves, a system that is changing itself at every possible instant; to quote another famous occult saying, "every man and woman is a star."

In the past decade, another famous esoteric saying, "No matter where you go, everyone's connected" has become far more true than the director of Serial Experiments Lain, Ryūtarō Nakamura, could have ever imagined. It's become impossible for any-body to be a no-body: every real or perceived sense of otherness now has a herd who will accept you with open arms so long as you subordinate yourself to alternative fixed ideas. This was made possible by the anarchy of production that the internet has been, which has meant both that it produced the embryonic class consciousness of transfems and is responsible for the current apocalyptic nightmare. Being an anarchy of production, the internet has functioned to affirm both the most destitute and the most privileged. It gave a voice both to transfems who have for most of our modern history been so marginalized, geographically dispersed and closely monitored by institutions that we have been either seen as nonexistent or as fictional characters whose only purpose was to be the butt of crude jokes, and also to mediocre hetero men throwing a prolonged temper tantrum because women entering the workforce has meant that they no longer have to marry the first man who shows an interest in them and got a job right out of high school that paid them enough to afford to buy a house. Both as a liberatory force and a force multiplier for popular revanchism unlike anything ever seen before, the internet has proven to be a mistake, or at least something that arrived far too soon. The logic of liberalism as well as that of the market is that it is impossible for us to know the nature of the Good except by a stochastic process of actors in the system being data points for how the system makes decisions, and it turns out that things are the same as they ever were as when Spinoza first asked why it seems to be that humans will so desperately fight for their own subordination; we know that it's probably a good thing for everyone to be housed, to not starve or freeze to death in the streets, or for children to be raped and eaten by pedophile billionaires who control every lever of power in the world other than the root of them all (the barrel of a gun), and yet the markets and the democratic system both indicate that these are in fact good things. On paper, we have dug this grave for ourselves at the end of the day: whatever decisions we make are not isolated from the world, because none of us could not be an absolutely unique individual if it did not involve being in a state of constant feedback with the world outside ourselves such that it's ambiguous where the distinction lies, but we nevertheless have a responsbility for how we choose to act given the current circumstances we find ourselves within.

When I first heard of the Snowden leaks in 2013, even at this stage in my life of not being a particularly principled or serious anarchist I did the rational thing and avoided informing on myself to the surveillance state as much as I possibly could. In 2014 I first learned of the existence of Lainchan via the 8chan cyberpunk board (RIP in piss), and obviously also of cyberpunk media in general and transhumanism. At this time I was as computer-illiterate as they come; I was always better at English than math or science and to this day at heart am more a writer than a computer-toucher. But after the initial superficial novelty of cyberpunk started to wear off I once again took something seriously that was becoming common knowledge to the point of a truism: we live in a sort of dystopia that Neuromancer predicted, so you better learn to become a console cowboy or a razorgirl if you want to survive it. All of this information was available for free right at our fingertips, and knowing now that all corporate computing was compromised, it was really simple to make the connection: learn Linux and learn to program or you will start to lose agency in this new world. Once again, I simply decided to do the things because I could, and as I became more properly radicalized it occurred to me that in the near future being technologically literate would become a useful skill both for my own survival and to provide to others. Early on this took on the more theatrical form I imagined in "Hello From the Wired", and while there haven't been many anarchist hackers DDoSing factories, using Signal and doxxing Nazis both became more common tactics over time compared to back in 2016 when most people didn't even understand what encryption was or why you shouldn't post plans to firebomb a Walmart on social media. For a time I even ran a short-lived anarchist imageboard as an offshoot from Lainchan that some might still remember before shutting it down due to technical incompetence (I still had no idea what the fuck I was doing back then) and economic precarity.

Fast-forward back to 2021: I first launched xnfm after a partial betrayal of my commitment to not being on the corporate internet because for a time, despite being a corporate platform, Twitter still managed to have an interesting and chaotic feel to it that had by that point started to supersede imageboards as a vanguard of internet culture and that was apparently enough of a shitshow internally that literal ISIS terrorists were able to have accounts on it without getting drone striked. But by 2021 this was no longer the case: it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that something bad was going to happen by how much more strict their automated moderation was becoming and how it was getting to the point that connecting a phone number to your account was practically required to post. But the thing that really got me was that my account had gotten banned for no clear reason, later was reactivated and then banned once again for no clear reason, after I'd managed to build a pretty substantial following that was largely extremely bad for my mental health and ultimately played a role in ruining my life. It became clear to me in that instant that anyone who uses a corporate social media platform, especially a striver who thinks they can post their way out of precarity and poverty, is not just a cop informing on themselves but a cuck with no dignity. Better to have the lore of being an infamous leftytwitter poster who punched above her weight, got out while she was ahead, and then disappeared to some weird corners of the internet than to try to desperately recoup my followers on a platform that can take that all away for any reason at any moment and also is selling everyone's data. As of the current year, anyone who is still using Twitter or any of the other web 2.0 corporate social media platforms as far as I'm concerned is not just a cop or a cuck but is actively engaging in a form of self-harm both to their own mental health and by willingly giving their data directly to a fascist state.

There's a saying that gets brought up a lot by people who are into things like cybernetics and complexity theory: the route-around incentive. It is in particular an extremely useful concept for talking about how the internet went from being a decentralized thieves' den of contraband information to a centralized Torture Nexus by looking at internet piracy in particular. A complex system of actors will often choose whatever is the path to least resistance to get the things they want, in this case access to media. During the early stages of the internet, before record label executives and Metallica even understood what the internet was, not only was piracy the only way to access digitized forms of media but it also was more efficient in a lot of cases since peer-to-peer networks are designed to route the fastest peers to each other whereas accessing a centralized server might be further away or under more load than if the traffic is decentralized. In this case, the route-around condition was the lack of access to digitized media and especially free access to digitized media. But we all know how the story went: Napster was shut down, more decentralized but less convenient technologies like torrents became the preferred protocol for evading intellectual property takedowns, and then iTunes, Spotify, and Netflix launched. For the price of Basically Free™ anyone could have access to as much media as they could stand in an extremely convenient interface that didn't require the user to be anything more than a passive consumer who is never challenged to be an active participant in the technologies they use in any way whatsoever, and so for a long time this is what was winning. The route-around incentive no longer existed; the new path of least resistance was to use the centralized streaming services.

Those who know anything about torrenting are hopefully objecting now that torrents still have a degree of centralization: the trackers themselves. This is of course mostly a different route towards convenience; torrent trackers aren't strictly necessary for torrents to be useful. But choosing to take on the role of a torrent tracker has often been done out of some other, mysterious quality than a simple immediate survival incentive that you may not be aware conscious beings have the ability to exercise: choosing to do things because they are good, because they must be done, and because no one else besides you is going to do them. Even now, in spite of the miserable nightmare that the internet has become, I obviously still believe in the future that the cyberhype theorists of the 90s like the CCRU wrote about; this has been both because and in spite of becoming more technologically literate over the past decade. As I have written elsewhere, even as I find the internet to be actively painful to use nearly everywhere if you engage with any of it as social software, I largely didn't grow up using the internet to talk to people on it. I absorbed internet culture from a distance as a dedicated lurker and otherwise got most of my mileage out of the internet via piracy and have maintained a growing collection of pirated music for about 20 years now. So it goes without saying that some of my personal heroes are all the various hacktivists who have been involved in piracy and archival, in particular The Pirate Bay, one of the most famous torrent trackers. It was reading about their infrastructure in particular that really made me appreciate the fact that they have existed for this long:

All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. All traffic goes through the load balancer, which masks what the other VMs are doing. This also means that none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting providers are publicly linked to TPB.

[…]

If the police come knocking in the future the cloud servers can of course be disconnected. However, with the site’s current setup it would be fairly easy to continue operating from another provider in a relatively short time.

Today, the situation 20 years ago when iTunes, Spotify, and Netflix all launched has been reversed: 10 years ago streaming services were already starting to become fragmented, inconvenient to use, frequently removing content or canceling original series due to copyright or sheer short-term thinking corporate greed. 10 years later, streaming services are all more expensive, fragmented, and full of ads. Piracy is on the rise again, and through all of this old heads like The Pirate Bay have kept the jolly roger held high even in the face of a truly terrifying threat model. Though there was a long winter, the laws of capital continue to turn like the laws of thermodynamics: a system without a brain, operating at the dumb limbic level of pure stochastic evolutionary impulse, that accumulates resources for itself in the absence of any incentive for survival eventually runs out of raw material to consume, becoming increasingly complex as it has to solve increasingly more edge cases in order to spread its tendrils further and accumulate more resources. Eventually, it becomes so bloated and complex that it starts choking on its own entropy; the same is as true for Netflix as it is for the median American voter.

When I had first started xnfm, it was done out of a purely selfish impulse to have a platform for myself where I own the data that I publish to the internet. While I could have chosen to just stick to blogging, and maybe should have, I still treat shitposting as an artform and it's the sort that only works in the context of social software where the posts are short and the feedback of interaction between publication and discussion is instantaneous. I had all sorts of hopes starting off that were largely disappointed because the thing I expected to happen is exactly what happened: network effects ensured that I was choosing to do what I have always done and go off on my own while few, and then almost none for the first year or two, decided to follow and stuck around. Most of the undignified rage addicts who used to be my followers or mutuals didn't decide to do what they should have done and stopped using corporate social media, because it turns out that if you're not using the most mainstream spaces imaginable where all your most base and passive impulses are catered to, you actually have to put some effort into what you're doing all the sudden; you have to use your brain and engage not only with the technologies you're using but also with the spaces themselves and their culture, which you can no longer take for granted but instead must recognize that you do in fact have agency and are not merely a passive consumer of information but a producer of it as well. You might say in response to this that life is hard for everyone these days; they don't have the time or energy to start using a different social network, learn its clunky interface and post into the void. To this I respond that a few months after launching xnfm I became homeless and then was living in the garage of a tranny polycule rape den; I've kept xnfm running this whole time, and for most of it with hardly anyone on the network who gives a shit about me or knows what I'm talking about. You probably have no excuse other than your own passivity, but even though you're probably a cop, a cuck, and a little bitch, it doesn't matter; we are all responsible for our actions, but we should not be blamed for them, and every moment is as always full of possibility for as long as you are alive. You can always choose to head for the exit and find those who are waiting on the other side.

Thus far I've not talked much about the posts from other fediverse admins that I decided to join in on talking about, and partly this is because I feel the need to contextualize the current death throes of the internet with everything that has lead up to it and what my own place in all of it has been. We cannot understand why all of this is happening by simply handwaving it as centralization, capitalism, fascism, whatever. We are living in Hell, but the difference between the Christian version of Hell and the Greco-Roman concept of the underworld that likely influenced early Christianity is that it was once not just Christ who was able to descend into Hell and then ascend to heaven. The myth of katabasis is found all throughout human culture, and it is hypothesized that the Eleusinian Mysteries were supposed to be a dramatic reenactment of the yearly descent of Persephone into the underworld, only to later return from it again with the arrival of spring. On a much larger scale, this is the esoteric truth of the Kali Yuga in Hinduism or Nigredo in European alchemy: everything must eventually die so that something new can be born. We have enjoyed a period of unimaginable prosperity in the west, particularly the US, for the past 70 years or so that is coming to an end because it was always only a one-time jackpot from another apocalypse, and then kept on life-support by new forms of imperialism, but this is now coming to an end. In order for the rest of the world to be free and prosperous, America must be destroyed; in order for the Wired to live up to its promise of opening the nExt world, we must first close this one, and it is long overdue.

My criticism then of all the discussion I've seen so far on this is that it's all framed with the "lifeboat" or "fire" metaphors, as if there is a finite resource that has now been depleted, and now there is no land in sight. To this I say that we should hasten the death of the internet as it currently exists, and we should neither make apologies for making the correct decision to jump ship early nor should we assume that all of this only happens in an isolated, homesteader type context of choosing to flee from a world that has become too dangerous and scary to huddle in our little bunkers, begging that we at least be left alone. I have said many times in the years that I've run xnfm that the fediverse has a lot of problems with both its culture and technology, and remaining irrelevant is probably preferable to the very plausible alternative that it get Extended, Embraced, and Extinguished like Google has done to the internet as a whole by using Chrome to influence the W3 spec. If the fediverse were ever to acquire a network effect, it would be trivial for a large corporation to subvert it like they've done with the internet and with the Linux kernel; ultimately all of these problems exist because no one is engaged with the cultural side of things adequately enough, and so many who are involved in these sorts of free software projects end up being clever midwits who would be content to play with puzzles while the world burns. As long as we continue to expect users to be passive and act on the assumption that they will only use things that are familiar to them, networks like fedi will continue to be irrelevant to anyone besides a weird intersection of people who are either the same people who write the software, or software freegan pod people who think that ethics in software development is a feature users care about, or the same Nazi pedophiles and wokescold class traitors who exist everywhere else anyways.

We must create a culture that produces things, that makes fedi a place that people want to use because it's where things are happening, instead of the same incestuous perpetual discourse and meta, the same social media bullshit you expect to have everywhere else except none of your friends are here. If there has been any reason for me to keep xnfm running aside from my own selfish interests to have a place to post, it's been to run a space that produces culture, because transfems are in need of a culture that isn't valorizing suffering. In the time that I've run xnfm, even in spite of everything I've found annoying about being on fedi and occasionally with xnfm itself, I've met lots of people I otherwise wouldn't have and been able to broker connections with myself or others that have helped people to flee from the onslaught of transphobic laws in the red states and find temporary housing. But this too I do out of self-interest, because I recognize that it is in my own self-interest to use my skills to provide services to others and acquire social capital that I may at some point need to cash in on, and because every girl on xnfm whose life may have gone in a different direction if they weren't on there is someone whose continued existence and connection to other transfems makes us all collectively stronger. Ultimately I'm still only hosting a shitposting site for insane trans women, and I have a lot of issues with the form of microblogging and social media in general that I would eventually like to replace with something else or at least run other software alongside of Pleroma, but doing something is always going to be literally infinitely more than doing nothing. The trick is to do things consistently, competently, with finesse and patience; not to chase after popularity and network effects but to build the stable foundations for a culture that will survive any given network or software and that infinitely many other things can be built on top of.

Instead of thinking of yourself as a refugee on a lifeboat, think of yourself as pirate. In the coming years as the ruling class tries to impose more control and surveillance over the internet, continuing to host fediverse instances is going to become more important and full of possibility than ever because it is increasingly running up against the aims of the ruling class. As we enter into another long winter for the internet, there is going to be increased selection pressure on instances, and this will require more creativity on the part of admins but ideally will be handled by improving the ActivityPub spec itself and its implementations to support things like encrypted DMs, key distribution, and nomadic identities. In order to survive what's coming, even on a purely selfish individualistic basis of wanting to be able to shitpost somewhere without having to give your ID to Palantir and Israel, we are going to eventually have to recognize the need to work together collectively and to be more organized. We should not strive for a fediverse that is a network of isolated instances where each one is simply able to communicate with each other but otherwise has no meaningful connection to each other. In an ideal world the fediverse would be a stable backbone of resources, with collectives of instances working together to provide useful services to their users and to act in an organized way against attempts to subvert the fediverse. So far we have only seen extremely low level opportunistic little bitches attempting to force themselves into positions of power with things like blocklists, and the response that the fediverse has had in response has largely been equally weak. There have been far too many cases of fedi users being targeted and harassed by these bad actors. The ruling class would prefer that we all shut down our instances and give up our papers to the ragebait panopticon; we are all in this together, so fucking act like it.

I often joke that xnfm is like the North Korea of fedi, both because of the communism and because it has always felt like we have existed in a particularly isolated kind of bubble from the rest of fedi, sharing very little of its culture. But I have kept it online for as long as I have, and tried to encourage the creation of other transfem-run instances and remain to the best of my ability a diplomatic and reasonable admin since I have no interest in being the petty tyrant of some irrelevant corner of the internet like fedi. It is my hope that xnfm, and perhaps fedi as a whole, will continue to grow; I've seen more users who were inactive for a long time start to post again, probably because all the corporate platforms are becoming miserable to use and potentially will start requiring government IDs, but not every tranny in the world is a gackpilled neoamazonian accelerationist and I absolutely do not want the responsibility of running a large generalist instance. There needs to be more of a push to bring as many communities and cultures as possible onto fedi, which as with everything else is both a technical and a cultural challenge. Much as I dislike having any authority being put on me like this, because with authority comes responsbility and ultimately I just want to read and write stuff and be left alone, the reason why xnfm is different from the rest of fedi is because it's run by a philosopher and transfeminist theorist of some note who happens to also be a weird insane person who goes through the trouble of learning all sorts of shit because nothing else that work to make normal people not want to kill themselves works for her. There are similar factors at play with our sister instances Translunar Academy and Worm Pink; both are transfem-run instances that have a distinct culture that clearly exists independently of being a fediverse instance, and we need more of this. People who are involved in communities with a distinct culture of any kind and who have the technical know-how to host fediverse instances should be starting up instances and trying to get people in their communities to join; those who have any degree of influence in the communities they're involved in should in particular be trying to use their influence to get people onto autonomous alternatives to the corporate internet. I will be the first to tell you that it will be a huge sacrifice that will at first seem like a completely insane move, but no one has ever done anything of note by chasing after popularity, just as desperation is a very unattractive quality. If you want to win you need to be a little bold and insane.

As always, I do all of this out of my own self-interest, and if it eventually turns out that fedi no longer offers any meaningful possibilities or autonomy for myself and my users, I will simply leave again and start organizing meshnet infrastructure on Reticulum in my city. I may start doing that regardless, because who knows how long even spaces like fedi will continue to exist before the internet as a whole must truly be abandoned. But until then, just as many instances have came and went in the time that xnfm has been around, I will still be here, shitposting in my moldering vampyre castle.