Thank you everyone for participating in wolfballs 1.
This has been a wild ride.
When wolfballs first started there was basically no free speach sites up.
Ruqqus was shutting down, scored did not allow community creation, saidit was always off and there was basically no where you could post people dying of vaccines.
It was a hard time for me. My job was threatened with a vaccine requirement. A threat I successfully fought off with a religious accommodation request.
I was scared, I felt powerless, and I wanted a place everyone could come and talk about all the crazy stuff that was going on without being threatened with weird censorship. Like doctors post being deleted.
Times have changed.
Twitter is a much better place. As we’ve seen from Eliza Blue there is still abuse. But the fedivserse is better too with new great instances like Poa.st
Scored has a lot of censorship but it is still better than reddit and you can actually get more than 20 upvotes on c/gaming.
rumble is now a viable competitor to youtube. locals is ok, gab has cemented itself as the king of say anything within American legal boundaries. (But no tities) , truth social is a thing and when people want to talk about election problems or vaccines killing there are now mainstream places to do that. There was not before.
There was a lot about moderation I did not understand though.
For one there are a lot of real nazi’s on the internet. I thought most of them were fake trolls just shit posting for lulz.
When I thought free speech I thought that doctors, lawyers should be able to give their professional opinions without fear of censorship.
That people should be able to give opinions on trials that are not popular but are supported by evidence.
Things get much more complicated though. There appear to be government actors and company actors who try to prevent sites from growing by posting purposefully provocative content.
Also the reddit format is really a relic from the early 2010’s and modern bots don’t allow it to function the way it was intended.
Up/down votes are meaningless when I can deploy a thousand bots to make content what ever score I want.
That is why reddit is full of weird products on the front page and they use so much shadow banning to try to keep that sort of behavior at bay.
In order for a categorical social media to work it must involve curation which is just another word for selective censorship. So the format isn’t really good for freespeech anyways.
I will explore more decentralized social media but it will look different and I will be under a different name.
It’s time to hang up the mask. Masterofballs unfortunately will die. Due to vaccine induced myocarditis i’m sure. However it is not the end for Mr balls because he will one day be reborn into something else. Maybe something better.
wolfballs will stay up for a few days for people to clean house, grab any memes you left and I’ll try to keep a backup somewhere and leave a way for people to contact me if they forgot something.
I hope everyone can check out exploading-heads or other cool instances.
Thank you everyone
MOB
I think there is hidden message here
Wolfballs 1? So there should be wolfballs 2. Did you finish developing the new platform?
Jokes aside. As I said in my happy new year post I had pretty fun moments here. Thanks to everyone who was here. Thank to MOB for hosting this instance absolutely free of charge. Thanks for everyone who kept this place moral and calm. Thanks to @iamtanmay@wolfballs.com for pinging me because I decided to have break from social media but this is a special occasion. Thanks for making my dream of being a part of small community of clever people become true. Thanks for pulling me into the self hosting rabbit hole 😂.
In 2-3 years I might be able to afford to host wolfballs and its domain if MOB is still contactable.
Everything has an end. Including all the good things. Thanks again
wolfballs 1 isnt necessarily a joke, there was a thought of making a new project with different name and it may still be in the works
hosting an instance can be pretty cheap also
I know about the new wolfbals that is/was in WIP. The joke is that this isn’t a goodbye but just “see you in the next episode”.
Sorry, I can’t make jokes 😅