New plant editor stuff is also in development, but hasn't made any notable progress, because I was away from home for 10 days.

I'd imagine the government only goes for big sites, so that should be no problem.

There is no way for image hosts like Imgur (where images for EE were hosted) to correctly label all images. So they just blocked all UK IPs, so they won't break the law. Everything has been moved to img.elysian-eclipse.com now.

Yes, but these laws don't make any sense. If you use a website, you'd have to log in to all third party providers and verify your age, because embedded content *could* contain NSFW. Which is completely unreasonable.

Yep. To be honest, I think if I didn't have to post my game updates somewhere, I wouldn't use any social media at all anymore.

Very different thing. With an instance you pretty much have your own social network. You own all the data. You can add your own features to it. Nobody can ban you. etc. And even if Mastodon shuts down, your instance will still be fully functional.

The point is that you can just have an instance only for friends for example. That way you decide what is allowed and people on other instances can still interact with your posts. (Easier said than done, I know. I'm personally on an instance that is managed by Mastodon itself.)

Yeah. People will only use a social media site, if people they know are already there. Mastodon is nice and can't just get enshittified due to being actually decentralized. But it only has ~9m users compared to Bluesky's 35m+ and Xitter's 100m+ making it way less attractive.

Anyway, here are some other places where I post.

Mastodon: mastodon.online/@wauzmons
Tumblr: www.tumblr.com/wauzmons
Discord: discord.com/invite/dhHJp5a

Sorry for ranting so much. I know that most of you are here to see funny creatures, but this had to be said. I will stay here for now, but will reconsider if things continue like this.

Like what the fuck. Is there a rule that you have to be a massive piece of shit to run a social media site or something? I guess enshittification will always happen if a site is owned by a business, but this is going way faster than I expected.

Finally we have the recent "Waffles" drama. This is a bit hard to summarize, but Bluesky is basically tolerating Nazis and Transphobes (JD Vance, Jesse Singal) here, by making them immune to the TOS. Any criticism about this will just be ignored or ridiculed with the phrase "Waffles"...

Now we also have porn censorship - and before you say it doesn't matter because you don't view porn on here - this will always spiral down into "we will censor whatever we don't like". Right now only noncon is banned I think, but how would you even define that. Is BDSM banned? Is Berserk banned?

Then we have the constant endorsement of GenAI. Not only is it allowed on this platform, but staff members are actively promoting it. Jay Graber posted an AI generated image on her account just yesterday.

First, they introduced a tiered verification system. As you can see on my handle, I'm verified, but I don't have a checkmark. The checkmarks are manually handed out by staff to people they find "notable", letting them make certain people seem more trustworthy.