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⭐️ Social ⭐️ Will bluelight still exist in a decade?

Yes bluelight most definitely will be here in a decade. I have been a member since 2004 that is over 20 years already I've been on this page so it's going nowhere
 
polarthedog said:
I’ve been reading people posting about old forums dying out, and have heard this site doesn’t have as much traffic as it used too.

What do you guys think? Will this site still be here in 10 years?
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Doubt it I think most of the internet will be gone by then and heavily censored.
 
fuckabout89 said:
Doubt it I think most of the internet will be gone by then and heavily censored.
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I understand what you are referring to... but this is exactly why Bluelight needs to remain independent.

I am 46 and I cannot imagine a world without a free internet, but yet, I know so much of what we now rely upon is being controlled by either big tech or government agendas. or just capitalism more broadly.

Bluelight, instead, is a small charity, with a non profit mission. And we created this part of the internet! It's a core part of what we do - so, unless the charity is folded (ie. we are unable to pay our bills), Bluelight.org will still be here. :)
 
Tronica said:
I understand what you are referring to... but this is exactly why Bluelight needs to remain independent.

I am 46 and I cannot imagine a world without a free internet, but yet, I know so much of what we now rely upon is being controlled by either big tech or government agendas. or just capitalism more broadly.

Bluelight, instead, is a small charity, with a non profit mission. And we created this part of the internet! It's a core part of what we do - so, unless the charity is folded (ie. we are unable to pay our bills), Bluelight.org will still be here. :)
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Cool, thanks for your perspective, that makes sense.

Hoping we all can keep contributing.

Drugs serve a purpose, varying purposes emotional and physical, and it is important to acknowledge.
Also, there are often less harmful ways to satisfy those needs. Sometimes not. But often there is.

It's not such a simple concept, and the issue is really bringing down humanity if i can be dramatic for a second.
So, that is why in my opinion we need contribution - to unpack the issue, and reduce how much harm stigmas and misinformation causes us.
 
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polarthedog said:
I’ve been reading people posting about old forums dying out, and have heard this site doesn’t have as much traffic as it used too.

What do you guys think? Will this site still be here in 10 years?
Click to expand...

yes

stood the test of time, will continue to do so.
 
Tronica said:
I understand what you are referring to... but this is exactly why Bluelight needs to remain independent.

I am 46 and I cannot imagine a world without a free internet, but yet, I know so much of what we now rely upon is being controlled by either big tech or government agendas. or just capitalism more broadly.

Bluelight, instead, is a small charity, with a non profit mission. And we created this part of the internet! It's a core part of what we do - so, unless the charity is folded (ie. we are unable to pay our bills), Bluelight.org will still be here. :)
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We love you too. :love:
 
I don’t think this world will still be here another decade so no. I doubt it
 
I took a decade off from BL and honestly didn’t expect to find it when I finally got around to looking for it again…

But here it was. A little less bustling for sure, but still feels like BL so I kinda expect things to be much the same in a decade or so.

Reddit ate basically all existing forums’ lunch, but many don’t vibe with Reddit so perhaps a more grounded and reliable resource like BL will always have some level of appeal.
 
Kellsee said:
I don’t think this world will still be here another decade so no. I doubt it
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Look there is that. I don't know that either. I have three kids... so for their sake, I hope there is a world left that is worth living in... and if there is, we will do our best to make sure Bluelight is still part of it. But totally get where you are coming from. There's a lot that's bleak happening right now. I do hold some optimism, only because in my day to day moments, I meet such good and kind people. And I know many people are making good things happen in the world, despite the gloom.
 
Shambles said:
I took a decade off from BL and honestly didn’t expect to find it when I finally got around to looking for it again…

But here it was. A little less bustling for sure, but still feels like BL so I kinda expect things to be much the same in a decade or so.

Reddit ate basically all existing forums’ lunch, but many don’t vibe with Reddit so perhaps a more grounded and reliable resource like BL will always have some level of appeal.
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Yes there's Reddit but there's also social media as a whole.

Back in the early 2000s, we had bustling social forums at Bluelight & at other web forums where I used to go. Then the social aspects were atrophied by Facebook and its cousins. Reddit seemed a logical place to go to discuss things that were less platable, like drug use, but it is interesting that these days, Reddit is a for-profit commercial entity that might just sacrafice its harm reduction / drug related content from a risk perspective. If that does happen, Redditors will need a place to go. We will be here.
 
^ Why is there a BL AI bot? If not to make money (is it?) what is it's purpose?

I have been warned by ppl that vanished to be worried about that --- (NO MORE SOFTBALL QUESTIONS -- lmao)
 
notsmokeymcpot42088 said:
^ Why is there a BL AI bot? If not to make money (is it?) what is it's purpose?

I have been warned by ppl that vanished to be worried about that --- (NO MORE SOFTBALL QUESTIONS -- lmao)
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I'm not sure what you are talking about exactly - There is PsyAI which is a harm reduction AI bot which we have supported over the years, but it's not Bluelight owned. But we have allowed it to be operated in our Discord and Telegram communities, under group supervision. This is useful because we moderators can see the answers it gives and if anything is unusual, we can add further information.

We were trying to get something happening in the forums with this same bot but there have been some issues with implementation and it may never actually happen, although i'd like it to, just because I've seen positive results in our other communities. This bot is trained only on a select group of material, including Bluelight's content, but also on content that most of us would be comfortable with - psychonaut wiki, etc. It's not like just letting people loose with a general model.

Bluelight is not set up to make a profit. We are a charity governed by a constitution which means the board members cannot profit from the organisation. We can 'make money' that gets funnelled back into the community. We have a set amount of costs per annum working on only volunteer labour. But if we were to have more funds coming in, we would be able to do some things that are hard to make happen with solely volunteers. I think there's a lot of untapped potential for Bluelight to grow, to reach more people, to create more harm reduction resources, etc. With more funds, we could do more, but one thing we can never do is 'profit' from that as individuals. I hope that makes sense. And always happy to answer questions around all of this!
 
I dont understand it at all and am CERTAINLY NOT ACCUSING ANYONE OF ANYTHING --- I just distrust A.I and find it to be sycophantic and data mining (so far)

I apologize again, I dont even understand the non profit model or lack of overhead.

I dont think A.I can testify anyways.... lol
 
notsmokeymcpot42088 said:
I dont understand it at all and am CERTAINLY NOT ACCUSING ANYONE OF ANYTHING --- I just distrust A.I and find it to be sycophantic and data mining (so far)

I apologize again, I dont even understand the non profit model or lack of overhead.

I dont think A.I can testify anyways.... lol
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No worries.
I don't think we can 'trust AI' either - at least, the AI models being pushed by big tech.
But what I saw here was an individual harm reductionist building an AI bot in their spare time and doing it for good.
And that was definitely worth supporting!

As for the non profit model, yeah I think we need to do more work in making that model clear to our community. We are going to be launching a better donation portal soon, and will have a set of info there that will hopefully make it a bit clearer.

I see us a bit like Wikipedia. We were created in the same era and have the same ethos. Information should be free. But in order to not be influenced by commercial interests, Wikipedia asks for community donations - rather than corporate sponsorships. We will look to do that more too, but still with the ethos that nothing on Bluelight will ever be put behind pay walls or made exclusively for people able to pay.
 
Tronica said:
Yes there's Reddit but there's also social media as a whole.

Back in the early 2000s, we had bustling social forums at Bluelight & at other web forums where I used to go. Then the social aspects were atrophied by Facebook and its cousins. Reddit seemed a logical place to go to discuss things that were less platable, like drug use, but it is interesting that these days, Reddit is a for-profit commercial entity that might just sacrafice its harm reduction / drug related content from a risk perspective. If that does happen, Redditors will need a place to go. We will be here.
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All the independent forums were killed off on purpose by google. They deranked them in search results starting in the late 2000s and they stopped attracting new users. Then came the flood of ddos attacks coming from someone with tons of bandwidth and server resources. Of course, a helpful service called cloudflare just happened to pop up around the same time offering to protect you from the ddos mafia. Provided you were willing to give them all the keys to your kingdom and let them monitor each and every user that came and went. Odd how that happened just like it was odd how forums and personal webpages started getting deranked/delisted the moment these centralized social media giants came on to the scene isn't it?

It's really amazing how "broke college student" managed to secure enough funding overnight to support millions of active users. Meanwhile, forums with millions of posts/users were stuck with server bills up into the multi-thousands of dollars a month. Strange. Wish I had some venture capitalist buddies and access to all those Government grants.

Don't even get me started on the spam waves.

We're seeing the last of the old web pages being taken down right now. They're blaming AI bots of course. Those are constantly hammering the FSF's web servers, tripod and anglefire just announced they're taking down all personal websites (bye bye 25+ years of web history), every small time website is forced to be behind services like cloudflare now. Many embed spyware right into the web pages to snoop upon your browser, habits and system specs to determine if you're a good boy. If you're a bad boy then you get your entire IP range banned and of course you aren't allowed to post anything unless you hand over an email address from a large trusted provider like gmail/hotmail and/or your real Government ID.

Then there are all the old wikis and forums that were abandoned in favor of things like discord. Which is horrible to navigate, impossible to archive easily and keeps that information locked up behind a log-in wall. Now people that would have browsed the wiki and forum back in the day and maybe become a member that contributes never sees the information to start with. I've seen a huge decline of new blood in pretty much all the places I've been hanging around for 20+ years. Everyone is over the age of 30 now with very few exceptions. When younger people do show up they complain how we don't integrate with things like github, discord or how our forum software isn't powered by something like discourse.

It's terrible what they've done to the web and I do not expect to have free access to it in a decade. It's obvious they're looking to delete the history hosted on it and push users into verifying their real ID to access the walled garden they're replacing it with.

This has been in the making for a long time. We had OSs and software in the late 1980s that would have allowed for the free sharing of data and information forever. They could integrate cleanly with any software. They were impossible to censor. They ensured no bit of data would ever be lost. The hardware systems could talk to each other and form natural beowulf clusters. They were easy to administrate, run, install, and replace. They weren't tied to any particular type of hardware.

But all of that was tossed away and in some cases made illegal so we'd get what we have today: Proprietary hardware running proprietary software produced by a handful of large companies who also happen to want to sell you access to their large centralized servers. Where the software runs on their server remotely so they can monitor and datamine you. Where you can be censored in real time and unpersoned for publishing the wrong thing. Where your home terminal/computer/phone can easily have multiple backdoors embedded into it so they can monitor you covertly. If you're a really bad boy they might even use their backdoor to sneak some data on to your local device then send an anonymous tip to the local police to have you raided. When you get to court they don't have to show the evidence against you since it's for certain eyes only. One wrong string of 1s and 0s and you go to prison for life with what is effectively a death sentence (death by inmate).

HTTP was never designed for all this crap. Even web forums were a bad idea in retrospect. We should have done this all over a different protocol. If HTTP hadn't been used in the way it was something like javascript and the modern bloated browser engines full of exploits wouldn't have happened. Instead of 100s of millions of lines of code to serve a dynamic webpage we could have been doing it in 100 lines of code and gotten more features and integrated better with our local systems. But if things were like that they wouldn't be able to monitor all the traffic flowing over the network as easily and if they attempted to it would be obvious to everyone.

The people that made sure the industry ended up like this were interested in things like: control of information, control over the user's machine/abilities and spying on the user. Money to of course. Why sell a copy of software for a one time purchase when you can milk the user for $10 a month for each piece of software running on your server?

Instead of empowering users they did everything they could to dumb them down as much as possible. None of this crap today called social media would have been socially acceptable to the users of the internet from the 1960s-1990s. Even the novices back then wouldn't have accepted it. Since they were taught not to put their real name on the internet and would have been shamed by nearly everyone else for advocating anyone do such a thing.

I've been here off and on since the place ran on UBB. I found many forums over the years because I was interested in making forum software. I wanted to make software that helped people communicate and spread information, data and goodwill. I wanted to bring people together and give everyone a platform. All that work I did might as well just be set on fire. Since most have willingly rejected it in favor of the easy path of hosting all their stuff on someone else's computer. Like I said in retrospect we should have never made web forums in the first place. Email, USENET, fidonet and the other protocols were already much better for this purpose, cost less to host and more resistant to censorship. The only issue with them was it was harder to get started using them. Which could have easily been solved with a new proper protocol.

Hell in 2001 I had a working implementation of NNTP working with the software that used to be used on BL. It was a copy-cat protocol I made in a couple of weekends that allowed you to tie together as many forums as you wanted and share a user database between them. It also allowed you to browse via a mail client like neomutt so you didn't have to use HTTP/browser to lurk and post. A month later I had an IRCd modified and running which used the same user DB for accounts. Which you could access with any IRC client or through the forum's index via a small javascript IRC client.

When I tried to release it and get some testers no one was interested. All the forum admins were worried it'd cut too much into their adsense money. The company that made the forum software was worried it'd cut into their profits. A lot of fear mongering about spam coming through mail got tossed around as well. I gave up on the project because no one would use it. No forums owners were interested in forming a "social network". The idea was you could sign up on one forum anywhere and log-in/post on any other forum within the network. Once I saw there was little interest I moved on to working on other things.

A few years later Myspace and later Facebook took off. Along with things like Digg/reddit. Web started to centralize fast. Those forum owners that were raking in thousands of dollars serving google ads were suddenly pissed off that their activity was tanking and that they were delisted from search results. Plenty paid thousand of dollars in an attempt to improve their SEO. Tons of scam artists showed up claiming to have the magic trick to get you back up to #1 in the search results. All those methods were quickly banned of course. Like modern youtube the google search of old was always a controlled system. Nothing gets top search result or high in the trending lists on social media without paying or being artifically promoted. Anything organic that manages to do that quickly gets delisted. Since it's usually deemed "misinformation" or "disinformation".

The good times aren't coming back I'm afraid. At least not until we seize control over the network. Which will take an act of war I'm afraid.

We are so far behind where we should be. Most things are still running on OSs that were designed and written in the 1960s. We've hacked a bunch of shit on top of that stuff and thrown more hacky shit on top of the hacks. Even our own hardware is effectively a black box now. Our CPUs and GPUs doing mystery voodoo behind our backs that require 8+ million lines of code to work with our million+ line of code kernel. Our disk controllers lie to us all day. Our packets aren't routed where we tell them to go and they're often modified in real time. A copy of each one being taken in-route and sent to some large datacenter to be inspected by the powers that be. The situation is really horrible.

You wouldn't believe what we've tossed away just in the name of keeping control/power. We had OSs designed in the 1980s that were intended to power everything modern society needs. Everything from the local factory, to the public train, to the computer you had at home, to the phone in your pocket, to your blender could have been running the same OS and could have easily talked to each other with no special software. You could be living in a world where you could access your media collection from any device in the world with a simple log-in prompt. You could be living in a world where you personally understood the software powering the bullet train you ride everyday to/from work because it was using the same mini kernel as your desktop computer and PDA. You could be living in a world where users were expected to learn how to operate and maintain their own systems because those systems are simple and the manual is small enough to read in a couple of hours.

But you don't. You live in a world where a handful of people/companies hold all of the power and you get to use the software they deem safe for you and read the information they deem to be "credible". Instead of a world where all the machines talk to each other using an open protocol you live in a world where all the machines talk to one big computer that someone else owns. If you've got deep pockets you can rent all the time you want on their computer. Just make sure you don't do anything naughty or they might take your access away and send a goon squad to your home to arrest you.

The burning of the Alexandria library is nothing compared to the digital purge of information happening right now. We are entering another dark age. I'll be surprised if anyone in 100 years will be able to operate a PC from today. They will probably be so ignorant by then that they won't know how to type or understand the concept of a keyboard at all. Assuming they could get it to boot they'd never be able to obtain access to the man pages or any other type of documentation. Owning one (or even touching one) will most likely be considered a crime on par with treason.

At some point in the far off future people are going to look back to the time between about 1950 and 2050 and wonder why the fuck no written records from that time exist at all. It'll be like we never existed. All the archives of digital data will have been lost or on the slim chance some are found the people of the future will not be able to figure out how to decode/decrypt them.

The above is probably why we have huge gaps in ancient history. I'm sure we've had this level (and probably great levels) of technology before. Once we get it we transition from writing to digital storage. Then some big disaster happens and all that digital storage is lost. Forcing us to start over and build back up again.

Anyway, it's always about control. Technology can be a wonderful thing that provides improved quality of life, freedom and can empower people. But it can also be used for horrible things as we all know. It's kind of like firearms. Firearms are great. You can feed a family for life with a firearm and a small cache of ammo. You can defend your family from people much larger than yourself. They put women and men on equal grounds when it comes to self defense. Even a child can defend himself with a firearm against multiple adults. But on the flip side they can be used for war, used to oppress and used for torture and all sorts of terrible things.

I'm sure you've noticed people into doing bad things with firearms always take away everyone else's right to own/use them. Same thing will happen with computers. It's simply too dangerous for the common man to own one. He might write subversive software and make other types of subversive content with it. Better to not give him access at all. Instead, we give him a dumb terminal that can only run software we approve of. Most of which is being run remotely on our servers so we can closely monitor him (and his thoughts). This way the state gets to benefit from the technology and the common man can be entertained by state approved content. If you distract him with porn and shit flinging he probably won't get the bright idea to make anything subversive in the first place.

Back on topic: The main thing that worries me about BL currently is the fact that they finally put up a link to a discord server. Just about every forum that I used that was active past 2015 or so was killed off by the same thing. Everyone migrating to discord. Leaving the forum to rot and eventually be taken down because the admin doesn't want to bother with it anymore and pay the bills. Always with the same excuse: "No one was using it and I had to log-in every night to delete the spam". I've already seen plenty of communities lose everything because of that. First the forum is taken down (and all the threads with it). If they have a wiki that usually goes offline not long after ("no one contributes and it gets spammed"). Then the discord "server" they moved to gets banned for some arbitrary reason by the company that owns discord. Of course, no one archived it. So now the information is lost forever.

I guess discord is honest about its purpose at least. It's right in the name: Discord. That's what it does; cause discord.

The most annoying thing about this is when I don't visit a place for awhile. Come back. Find out everything is now on discord and the wiki/forum hasn't been updated in 2-3 years. Try to make burner account for discord to get at one piece of information I need. Discover it's locked behind a locked channel that requires begging for access+handing over cell phone number to view. Then when you finally do get into the channel you can't find anything because a chat room is the absolute worst interface to host most content.

So now you're scrolling back through years of mindless off-topic BS to find the one thing you need. That should have been a page on a wiki or would have been easily found in a forum thread. I hope you have a burner cell number too because 90+% of crap is locked behind a cell phone number wall now. If you don't have one they will not let you in anywhere these days. Everything wants 2fa despite the fact that it does nothing to protect your account. Everyone claims passwords aren't good enough. No no, they want as much personal information about me as possible. Even for information that isn't that important in the grand scheme of things. I had to go through all this bullshit to access input commands for a video game recently. I had to go through the same song and dance 32 times to access everything (each character in game had its own discord server).

This is fucking bullshit. Only insane people would think this was acceptable.

I hope BL continues to live on. But I'm not very hopeful that it will be able to continue to exist in the years to come. The push for digital ID/verification of users age is going to be really hard on BL. I expect to see multiple countries start banning access to BL at the ISP level soon. If you look on youtube one of the first things they ban for age restricted accounts is anything to do with drug use. It's banned faster and harsher than most every other subject. You can't view videos with drug references/use even though videos with ultra violence and porn go right past those filters.

Are you willing to hand over a copy of your Government ID to access BL? I'm not. No one else should. But that's the direction the wind seems to be blowing. This is outside of the admin's control. There is nothing the admins can do about the laws. They will be given the choice to comply and link with the Goverment DBs or they'll be blocked. You won't be able to get around the block with a VPN/proxy either. Since the laws being passed right now are making sure to close that loop hole to.

I figure it'll be so bad in 10-15 years you won't be able to access the internet at all without an approved device. Older devices will be blacklisted from the internet entirely at the ISP level. If you don't have the special chip to verify with the Government's server you won't be given an IP address. They'll claim this is for security reasons as they always do. Or "protect the children".
 
I really hope so. Ive beeen on here 20 years now i cant imagine the internet without it. It reminds me of the old internet
 
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