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This was a long time coming. After watching the Rebuilding Community on the (fujo) Web at Citrus Con this weekend, it unlocked a lot of thoughts on my involvement with the Yesterweb I've been reluctant to type out.

Part of the reluctance stems from my own mixed feelings—the Yesterweb was a really cool space that I believed in; then it lost a lot of enjoyment. Another is that I don't like "call out" posts—rather, I'm focusing on things I've learned from being a part of the Yesterweb. Perhaps this will be useful to others as well as indieweb/smallweb communities thrive.

First, some context: I love fan communities on the web. I've never seen a group of people so dedicated to "hacking it until we make it" when it comes to expressing their own creativity and putting adult works on the web for other 18+ fans to enjoy.

In 2021, @mabbees and I did a talk, which turned into a zine article for the Yesterweb Zine called "The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of Slash" that covers a brief history of how the fan scene of LiveJournal and delicious was censored or mangled for fans.

With the current degradation of the centralized internet and more and more people retreating to smaller places, this was a perfect time for a "small web renaissance." This is how I came to find the Yesterweb.

I'd participated in the Yesterweb community Discord actively during some of their formative years making zines (2021~2022). I had a lot of good memories with the Yesterweb, However, as the movement grew, I left, due to two things:

Let's talk about the first one. I mentioned our game in our first article in passing for the first zine article on slash, built a full game for Hall-O-Zine, then wrote a piece about including marginalized voices in nostalgic discourse.

The third link initially had more mentions of Terranova as I was actively researching nostalgia from non-white communities to build the game. I was invited to speak on Yesterweb Radio, then the invite was rescinded. I was also asked to remove any mention of our game from the third article—either to remove or rewrite it. I rewrote it.

The reason was that our game was paid and therefore "commercial." The Yesterweb was "anti-commercial" so they didn't want to promote our game to an audience that would be vulnerable to "nostalgia marketing." At first, I agreed though I didn't completely understand—I wanted to agreeable and part of the group—but what really confused me was that there was no requests to the members themselves to stop posting links to AAA paid Steam games Overwatch and Fortnite links were shared, paid DLC was shared, but I was not allowed to mention the game I'd worked on as an indie group.

The second one, the rule about not discussing kinks, porn, or content depicting sexual acts was something @mabbees and I questioned—being old queers on the Net we know what the "you can go somewhere else but you can't hang out here" dogwhistle looks like, and that looked like a blanket ban on adult content or creators.

Adult artists and queer artists often turn to the smallweb for their projects, and kink/sexuality/queerness is inextricably linked—kink and queerness is messy, and yes—the smallweb should have messy parts. We had initially thought the Yesterweb was accepting of this, and this didn't make sense to us; but then when we read the responses and realized the mods weren't open to discussion, we were disheartened.

The response we got was that this content might be "sensitive or triggering" to people who had been abused and therefore should not be permitted to make others uncomfortable.

We also heard that "there are many other spaces you can go online to do this." This is untrue. There are not many spaces to do this. It is the reason why adult artists make their own websites.

Finally, after a short discussion that more or less ended in a "if you don't like it, then leave," comment, I understood. From a moderation perspective, if the Discord was already open to all (including non 18+ folks) then there's extra moderation that needed to happen. The mods didn't have time, interest or energy to put in the work to moderate it. Sexuality is messy, so not inviting it at all made sense to them. This wasn't explicitly stated—they still maintained the position they were open to everyone, just not open to discussion from adult artists or people who were pro-adult artists.

My take? It was their Discord, so they could moderate or not moderate it the way they wished. But it didn't sound like that was what they were publicly preaching—that they were committed to social responsibility and collective well-being, and encouraging conflict amongst people with different experienced.

It took the excitement I had out of working with the folks on the Yesterweb.

So I quietly left.

Later, I heard they closed down.

suboptimalism posted a blog about the Yesterweb's move from Discord to forums and the chaotic and dramatic shutting down of the Yesterweb. A quote as to why it shut down:

the reasoning for the shutdown the staff give at the start of the thread seems to be something along the lines of "the community is too big for us to moderate and nobody we trust has stepped up, so we're going to shut the whole thing down to prevent anyone from exploiting what we've built".

It's understandable that there was too much mod work for a small community—having worked as an organizer for small communities before, this is very much the case, and in order for a small community to grow dynamically it must empower its members to create action.

But this comment in particular stung:

staff member auzziejay explains early on in the thread:
"There are too many opportunists, too many people that used the YW for financial or even just social gain. We thought maybe the issue was the discord server-it wasn't. It was a systemic issue."

Why would you say members of your community were opportunists?

I thought back to the discussion about removing mention of our indie game. In my case, I contributed two zine articles and built an entirely free game solely to promote the Yesterweb (Costume Panic!) before promoting a paid game.

I'm still a little miffed about the blanket implication I exploited or was trying to exploit the server for financial gain. Terranova doesn't make us millions, We did it on nights and weekends with @mabbees and we used our personal savings to pay each artist that worked on our game.

In my opinon, more indie devs should charge money for their games.

It's taken a while for me to write this because I was unsure what my learnings were from being a part of the Yesterweb. I'm glad to have been a part of the community before it transferred over to the forums, and I don't regret making zine articles or games for them. It was fun.

I met some really rad people in the server too, particularly HEX BOMB who I contributed to their zine OUR SPACES WERE NOT MEANT FOR US about adult artists and the web. Prior to the ban on adult content, we met on the Yesterweb Discord. They're cool people.

I discovered another grassroots organization called FujoCoded that has been talking openly about collective activism in the fujoshi/BL space. They talked about organizing folks to revive the smallweb again after a talk at CitrusCon this weekend and I compiled a resource list of all the topics they spoke on, namely:

Here's the list if you'd like to take a look.