Friends, let me tell you—having your own website is great.
Sort of.
I mean, it costs real money; and there’s no microblogging framework to easily disseminate your updates, necessitating you plug yourself on social media; and your website is still, ultimately, at the mercy of things outside your control, like the WordPress mainframe updating its text editor to the awful Gutenberg interface.
Creating my own website is a solution to circumventing Tumblr’s deplatforming of my NSFW content, but it isn’t a perfect solution.
A lot has been written about the economic and legal pressures on businesses like Tumblr and Facebook, who are banning NSFW content and instituting harsher Community Policy guidelines both to be in compliance with FOSTA-SESTA and to advance their own monetization schemes. It’s probably going to get worse.
On the other hand, it is always getting worse. Fandom purges are a routine part of the internet biosphere: websites grow large and popular on the backs of NSFW creators, then gentrify-out the “undesirable” elements when management believes them no longer necessary, or when laws or vocal opponents make maintaining NSFW content too difficult, too controversial, or too uneconomical to continue.
In this regard, everything old is new again. Thanks to FOSTA-SESTA, I suspect we’ll see a growing balkanization of NSFW online communities, as individuals host their content on personal websites, and/or lurch to new community sites.
Because don’t get me wrong: other companies will step into the breach and say that this time, they can provide you with the free and NSFW-friendly community for your art and writing.
And they will. For a time.
I suspect we’ll see RSS feeds come back into vogue, alongside small-scale chat rooms and forums and link pages. These were all things that were seemingly made obsolete by sites like Tumblr—by the centralization of internet communities into a few sites that promised easy, free, even democratic, platforms for individuals—and which are now threatened by what seems to be a growing seachange in how our society treats “pornography” and “sex work.”
But how different this moment is from previous purges, and whether the creation of smaller, individualized sites is a long-term solution, depends on how effectively interested parties are able to use FOSTA-SESTA as a cudgel against the First Amendment. Frankly, there’s always the possibility that hosting providers will eventually ban NSFW content en masse, regardless of what their Terms of Service are. We live in strange, interesting times.
In other “everything old is new” news, I’ve uploaded and formatted five more stories! I have yet to publish them, though, as I want to confirm that I have permission to re-host the stories with the original artwork that inspired them. You can always follow me on twitter for updates!