rawTOP

Announcement time… 🎉🥳🎈🍾 The social media solution I was telling you about is called Nostr. Not to be too technical, but it's not a site, it's a protocol that defines how to do messages that are cryptographically signed using a decentralized network (for comparison HTTP, FTP, and email are protocols). I won't go into crazy detail here. I've written A LOT of explainers on my site s3x.social - check out the site to learn all the little details about Nostr. Why I think it'll be great for you guys… It's an open source project and most of the people working on it are releasing their code on GitHub. So far no major companies are involved. Two of the founders of Twitter (Jack Dorsey & another co-founder of Twitter who's non-binary) say Nostr is what Twitter was supposed to be. Jack Dorsey says he prefers it over Bluesky (the social media solution he's now associated with in the press). I'm not mentioning the non-binary's person's name since I don't want this page coming up in Google searches for them, but they've largely dumped a project their company was working on that was based on Scuttlebutt (a Nostr competitor) and is going all in on Nostr. It's impossible to truly censor people on Nostr - that's both a good thing and a bad thing (more on that in a moment). A number of the core Nostr developers are openly sex worker friendly - which hints at a respect/tolerance for sexual minorities. There are currently about a half million active users on Nostr. Most of the users are from the Bitcoin community, but there are also quite a few from China & Japan. It's important to know that Nostr is pretty rough around the edges right now - but it's improving rapidly. Part of the "rough around the edges" is the fact that it's rather complicated to get started. Which is where s3x_SOCIAL comes in… s3x_SOCIAL You won't actually browse Nostr using s3x_SOCIAL. I may add that later, but for now s3x_SOCIAL will focus on doing the following: Help you get started. It'll set up a profile for you, host your xxx rated profile photos, and help you find people to follow. [NONE of that is ready yet. The closest I've come are the previously mentioned instructional "explainers".] It will offer you guys "NIP-05 verification". That will let you be YourName@breeding.zone - or you can choose from a long list of other possible sites, if you prefer one of those instead of breeding.zone. You'll get free use of the s3x_SOCIAL Nostr relay if you use s3x_SOCIAL for NIP-05 validation and agree to be listed in a directory of users. (A relay is one of the data servers that the app you'll use will pull information from. There are some public relays, but most relays require payment - mostly as a way of combatting spam. Anyone can read from the s3x_SOCIAL relay, but only paid or comp'd members can write to it). In time you'll get file storage at s3x_DRIVE. Nostr relays (for the most part) only handle text - not images, video, audio files, etc. For that you'll need to link to the file on a media server. Most media servers don't want x-rated images. If they see one, they'll delete it. I'll be building a porn-friendly media server you can use. (And a bunch more) If you go to s3x_SOCIAL - DON'T REGISTER! Instead you can login with your Breeding Zone user name and password. BUT there's no point in logging in since I'm still working on you being able to set up your profile. Oh, and registering for / logging into s3x_SOCIAL is not the same registering for / logging into Nostr… You do that with a client app. Basically, right now, s3x_SOCIAL has a lot of information, but you can't actually do anything on it yet. But it has all the information you need to get started with Nostr. It's just won't be with the easy interface I'll eventually make. If you do sign up… Please post your 'npub' in this thread and I'll set things up so you can use the s3x_SOCIAL relay. You can find the Nostr accounts for my sites by following the links on the NIP-05 page. I'm not posting much (as rawTOP), but if you want to follow me, my npub is: npub1x30jemy23qme0rkc8jkhk72tvzch35emeh6pw968449w4hywys8qg6t4kx And please follow s3x_SOCIAL: npub1k27tyhsg9hqqy2zm7lgxk9n3kafsy8e7x6du6hnes8q65mr2aslqn3vmmj Content Moderation & Safety Issues The other question is "is this a safe place for people like us?" To that I'd say it's about as safe as any other type of social media - except maybe ones that are locked down and members-only (like the Backroom here). That said, I did get my first death threat on Nostr the other day in response to announcing the launch of the s3x_SOCIAL relay. But the person is an exception - most of the folks there are pretty tolerant and easy going. Honestly though, more needs to be done to have proper content moderation. Since it's an open source project it's a perfect chance to practice "be the change you want to see in the world" - so I dived in, signed up for GitHub and started a discussion about how handling of "sensitive content" needed to improve. Since I was discussing sex and porn I managed to use so many explicit terms I got banned by Git's moderation bot. It took me three weeks to get back into my account. Then there was the first Nostr conference which I watched remotely. Only two of the presenters mentioned content moderation. The developer of the only Apple-approved app for iOS mentioned it briefly. But the non-binary co-founder of Twitter I mentioned above dedicated most of their talk to it - to the point people labeled them "the censorship guy". The two of us teamed up and have been pushing the idea of content moderation. We're determined to get something better in place and will keep at it until it happens. Read this if you want to understand our vision for content moderation on Nostr. One thing I like about Nostr is the potential fluidity of communities, and "moderation". Mastodon (and a few other platforms) have been trying for years to do what Nostr is finally figuring out and doing right. All Mastodon manages to do is replace a corporate censor with lots of little censors who control their part of Mastodon. When I read it described that way I chuckled - it described my relationship with Breeding Zone pretty much perfectly. Trust me, I'll be a hard ass, and there are times when I have to be, but it's a role I do a little reluctantly. So with Nostr let's say I ban someone from s3x_SOCIAL - big deal… All that happens when I ban someone is their content gets deleted off my relay. They're no longer my problem, but you can still interact with them if you want to because they're still on Nostr. Nostr is bigger than my little piece of it. If you're a developer who uses GitHub, I could use your help Here are things we could use help with: To get our pull request approved to move forward with content moderation, we need to come up a simple client app that can demonstrate what we're talking about. I'm struggling with that. So any help would be appreciated. We could also use people to support our vision as we introduce pull requests to improve content moderation. So even moral support would be greatly appreciated. There are changes that are needed to other open source Nostr-related projects as well. For example one of the really popular relay servers can't accept reports on content from anyone but paid members if it's in "paid relay" mode. Given than anyone can read the problem content from the relay - that's a legal problem for relay owners like me. DM me if you can help with any of that.

Thanks. It's been fixed. I've making a bunch of changes today and failed to dot my I's and cross my T's - so to speak.

It actually IS a free service, but there will be paid upgrades, so to speak. Most of the development has been open source. I'll explain more about possible costs later. It has built-in support for Bitcoin Lightning payments - which is a simplified/faster way to do Bitcoin transactions (it's "off-chain"). I agree that Bitcoin is unstable - which just means you shouldn't keep any significant amount of money in it - periodically all but a little bit out by converting it to fiat. Yes, that is my worry too. We'll have to see how it turns out in practice. I honestly don't know how that will go. Right now the guys on it sometimes make it clear that they're pretty conservative, but I've seen almost zero political discussions. And oddly they avoid sex and porn as well. But they're literally religious/cult-like about Bitcoin - to the point of it being disconcerting. But at the same time some of the people working on it have come up with great ways to reduce the spread of things that are controversial/disturbing. One has coded things so you won't see it unless someone you follow or someone they follow posted it. Gone are the corporate algorithms that intentionally try to get people arguing to up engagement and sell more ads. So chances are the crazies will only be followed by crazies - and we know crazies hate an echo chamber.

No. You must disable deletion the same way you initially requested it - in Settings.

The thread about newTumbl kicking people off their platform reminded me that I should mention that there's a censorship-resistant social media solution that's in the works thanks to the bitcoin community. Right now it's a bit rough around the edges - to put it politely - but also far slicker than you might imagine - and getting better by the day/week. It's almost impossible to get completely kicked off of it. So if you're tired of people (including me) telling you what you can and can't do on social media sites - you'll like it a lot. So watch this thread. I'll explain how to get started on it probably next week or early the following week. Before I explain it to everyone I need to accomplish a few things: My host is migrating me from a server in Miami (red state - boo!) to a much faster server in Michigan (blue state - yeah!) I need a particular new application set up and running on that before I announce anything. I need to finish my documentation on how to get started (it's a bit more confusing than it should be right now). I need to finish the ability to set up accounts on my new sites. Ideally I'd also have image uploads ready - but that's probably a month or 6 weeks off. So stay tuned…

DrScorpio is right - it almost certainly means you've requested account deletion. Not being able to view your profile let's you know the account deletion is in progress. The error starts a number of weeks before actual account deletion so you have plenty of time to turn off account deletion if you no longer want your account deleted.

As he requested, he’s now banned for a long time.

I spent a fair amount of time this weekend and this morning drafting an 8 page (!) explanation of how to protect kids from accidentally seeing porn without infringing on people's free speech rights or their right to privacy. I then emailed it and sent it registered mail to Senator Schumer's legislative director. If anyone can get a good child protection law through Congress it's Schumer. The question is whether their eyes will glaze over when the read the details - so I had an older, (well-known) straight fetish producer who's a bit of a Luddite read it to make sure it was understandable. He liked it, but it wasn't the first time he heard me explain the concept. If I don't hear from Schumer's office in 2 weeks I'll send it to a Congressperson who's from Silicon Valley who has staff who are technical enough to understand it, and Big Tech connections connections who can validate that it can work technically. And if I haven't heard back from someone two weeks after that I'll alternate Senators & Congresspeople with technical expertise every two weeks until I hear from someone. Hell, I'll even hit up Mitt Romney if I run out of Democrats since I could see him supporting my approach. (Mormons tend to be fairly level-headed and practical on stuff like this). "Be the change you want to see in the world" - right? It is getting some press coverage, but not a lot. California also passed a law last year. The big social media companies pretty quickly filed a lawsuit to challenge it on First Amendment grounds. The thing is the Republicans wrote their laws so the government wasn't involved. Like many of the recent anti-abortion and anti-trans laws they get private citizens to file the lawsuits. So there's no way to file a lawsuit to challenge the lawsuit - we have to wait until someone is sued. I think a lot of porn companies are either unaware of the new laws (they went into effect quickly) or they assume someone will file a lawsuit challenging the laws (which is impossible), so they don't think they're a threat. Some paysite owners are making the tours PG-13 and then choosing a commercial service for age verification when someone from a restricted state goes to buy a membership. While the cost of those commercial services is cost-prohibitive for sites like this one, it's not in the context of someone buying a membership. So you're OK with this site shutting down if enough states enact similar laws? I'm thinking of banning you just so you can experience what that would be like.

The software that drives this site isn't capable of integrating with age verification services. Changing that would be cost prohibitive. Even if it could handle AV, the reoccurring costs would be more than Breeding Zone makes Even if the cost were affordable - it would block search engine spiders like Google (since allowing Googlebot/Bingbot through based on their user agent strings probably violates the law). Those search engines are the primary source of new members That will result in the slow death of the site - which is exactly why these laws are being passed - they want us to go out of business. I've said this pretty loudly on the main adult industry forum - there is a completely different solution which won't put us out of business. They're called Private Access Tokens (aka PATs). Apple has already started to use PATs to replace CAPTCHA, and Google is working on implementing them as well. The idea is that your device knows more about you than anyone else. Apple and Google are using them to confirm that the user is human. They could also be used to confirm whether adult content blocks are in place on the device. Then the parent only has to do a minimal amount of parenting to turn on the adult content block. (And adults who don't want to see adult content can turn on the block as well). Then PATs can be used to confirm that adult content block is not turned on. It's quick, cheap and efficient. And PATs are completely privacy-protecting. There's no 3rd party who knows you're accessing adult content. There's no additional database that can be hacked since it happens in the moment with no logging. Thing is, it's not age verification. It's verification of a lack of an adult content block. But it achieves the same goal. Actually, PATs would be more effective since the current laws don't apply to the major social media sites since the laws only apply to sites with >33% "harmful" content, and PATs are so quick, cheap and easy that even social media sites could be required to use them. At the end of the day these laws are being written by religious conservatives with the goal of putting sites like this out of business. Our silence is allowing them to determine how children are protected. They are not the best people to be writing these laws - their goal is to put us out of business. If the tech industry worked with the adult industry we could do a better job at protecting kids and not put us out of business. The laws in LA & VA want more than that. Yet those age verification pop-ups do help. It's pretty widely accepted that you'll never stop a kid who's determined to see porn. They will find a way to get around anything you implement. The thing absolutely no one wants and which needs to be addressed is kids accidentally seeing porn. The age verification pop-ups do help, but they're not perfect. Having to enter a birth date is even better. But the real problem is social media sites - and they're not covered by these laws - because the laws were written by people who want to put us out of business - "protecting children" is just a ruse.

If you're in Virginia - pay attention! You're about to be blocked from using this site. Just as Louisiana was blocked from this site a few months ago - your legislature just passed a bill similar to Louisiana's (with near unanimous support, and no one speaking up against it). Given the conservative leanings of your governor and the lack of opposition - it looks like it will pass, at which point I'll block the state of Virginia. More details here: https://apple.news/AEC0QFlK_RWu-ECr74wy3DA Please do the legwork and figure out if there's a way to stop this. And remember - WHO YOU VOTE FOR MATTERS!!

I just put something in place so 45 days after you request account deletion your profile page will start throwing a "not found" error. After doing a batch of deletions I usually get a guy or two saying "Why did you delete my account?" or "Why can't I login?" - either they had forgotten that they requested the account deletion, or they didn't logout and someone with access to their computer requested the deletion. This will up the chances that they see something is wrong and cancel the deletion request before it's too late.

Here's a weird factoid for you… You've probably heard of your "gut microbiome" but did you know penises have microbiomes too? And they're altered by circumcision… Full article here - https://www.sciencealert.com/circumcision-appears-to-alter-the-penis-microbiome-study-finds

This has been implemented. Every week or so I'll update the list of long bans. In the meantime if you try to go to a profile that has a long ban you'll get an error. That means that Google will drop those profile pages from its index (though it may take a week or so).

If I could reinstate it, then it wouldn't really be deleted, would it? When people ask for their accounts to be deleted they expect it to be in a manner where it's actually deleted. The laws on this topic also expect that. And to be clear - the only time I delete accounts is when someone goes into Settings and requests account deletion. Which means either someone had access to your account and requested it without your knowledge. Or you were high/drunk when you requested it and forgot you had requested it. Accounts aren't deleted until at least 60 days after the request - so there's plenty of time in there where you could have forgotten if you were impared at the time you did the request. I can't help any of those scenarios. It's up to you to 1) secure your account, and 2) take responsibility for what you do - even if you're drunk or high when you do it.

The one gotcha about how the software for this site works is that if you're permanently banned you can't login to request account deletion. (The software is what it is - I don't develop it - I just do what I can with it.) The other day I thought up a 1/2 way decent compromise… I'll make it impossible to view profile pages for users who've been banned for long periods of time. (For those who are techies - I'll return a 410 response code for those URLs.) The page technically will still exist, it just won't be viewable. I've written some code to do the blocks. I'll test it tomorrow. (It's part of a process that runs daily and I've already run the process today).

We have never sold the mailing list for this site. The closest we came was many years ago we gave it to a trusted sponsor who sent out promotional emails on our behalf. They assured us the list was deleted after they sent out the emails. But we don't even do that kind of thing any more. I responded to this user MANY times. He just didn't like the response. When his repeated emails turned harassing in nature I stopped responding.

And immediately after I write that someone reported a problem when they're using Safari on an iPhone 14… So not an old browser…

After some back and forth with the developer of the software used to run this site, I've implemented something which I hope will help reduce the problem. I suspect the problem is with older web browsers that don't fully support date input fields. When that happens the browser just treats the input area as a normal text input area. The developer put a placeholder (hint) into the area that said "Birthday" which is completely unhelpful to people who need to enter the date as text. I've written a Javascript which changes the placeholder hint to "YYYY-MM-DD" which let's people with older browsers know the correct format they need to enter to have their birth date understood. If you have a newer browser your browser will give you some sort of date picking interface and will then submit the value in that format. Some of the date picking interfaces are rather frustrating when you have to go years in the past, but that's your browser's fault, not the fault of the site coding. Now to see if the reports of problems go down significantly. 🤞

https://apple.news/AWT1Nmy_IRFWBxdJEDROEdA [Personally I've never had a particular good experience with marijuana. I've tried smoking it, I've tried edibles, etc. It's just not my thing. At the end of the day, while hardcore chem sex bothers me on many levels, I couldn't care less about guys using pot. IMHO, it's pretty harmless.] This site has a Chem Sex section, but with pot becoming increasingly legal, I'm questioning whether discussion of pot use is necessarily "chem sex" or whether it's somewhere between smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol. What are your thoughts? Those of you with addiction issues - is marijuana use something you'd like to see segregated along with chem sex? (That's another driver of what goes in that section…)

This isn't a development or business forum. So Urban, your questions aren't really appropriate here, so I'm locking the thread. (Don't start up another thread on the same topic - that will get you banned).

@MusclePup, @heavilypiercedguy, @Faggotwhore72, @rjtopher - you're all set. I'll try to release something tomorrow for you guys to see / test / discuss, but it won't be as much as I wanted because I came to the realization that I want to upgrade the page(s) to the latest version of Bootstrap. I was hoping to also release the text entry part of setting up a profile, but because that involves forms and how Bootstrap works with forms changed over the years since I initially built those pages, it'll take some time to get that working.

Done.

@UKFFBBBtm, @Medwaym, @cumslutfuckpig, @Pureviralchaser, @Chris42 - You're all set up. @Oldercumslut - You actually already had beta tester access. @BtmSubBoi, @PigglyScruff - ask again when you're out of "New Member" status.

We can't really take feature requests for the site since it's off-the-shelf software. Sorry.

It's because they went directly to my host, not to me. That sours my relationship with my host if it happens too often. And in this case it was an exposure fetishist who posted the content himself. It wasn't even piracy. I get it if some take down service goes to the host directly in a case of piracy, but members are expected to work within the community to get problems resolved.