In June 2023, when Threads announced their plans to federate with other Fediverse instances, there was a good deal of debate around whether smaller instances should allow federation or block it pre-emptively. As one of the admins of woof.group, I wrote about some of the potential risks and rewards of federating with Threads. We decided to wait and see.

In my queer and leather circles, Facebook and Instagram have been generally understood as hostile environments for over a decade. In 2014, their “Real Name” policy made life particularly difficult for trans people, drag queens, sex workers, and people who, for various reasons, needed to keep their real name disconnected from their queer life. My friends have been repeatedly suspended from both platforms for showing too much skin, or using the peach emoji. Meta’s moderation has been aggressive, opaque, and wildly inconsistent: sometimes full nudity is fine; other times a kiss or swimsuit is beyond the line. In some circles, maintaining a series of backup accounts in advance of one’s ban became de rigueur.

Hey y’all! It’s been, gosh, what, ten years? I finally finished a total site redesign: all-new backend, HTML, CSS, modern image formats, etc. It’s finally readable on mobile now!

There’s a lot of accumulated cruft in the database and filesystem–aphyr.com is old enough that it still has redirects for CGI scripts written circa 2005. While I’ve tried as hard as I can to preserve compatibility, older posts may not look great, or there might be subtle formatting/text-processing issues. If you notice anything that looks super broken, leave a comment (either on the post itself or here), and I’ll try to get it sorted out!

Hey y’all. Doing some long-overdue upgrades on aphyr.com; service will be up and down for a few hours; emails might bounce, etc. as I get things sorted.

Update: All finished, thanks for bearing with me!