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04/17/2024: Welp, That Blew Up Fast

(Warning: There’s not much other than me mention some dumb Neocities drama that happened recently and some swearing.)

Well, things got real hectic around here. Just a few days ago, a Neocities website, federiefederi, made everyone real angry. What happened is that they wanted get their site to the top 8 and in order to do that, they had to unfollow everyone, which made people mad. The reason why they did that as the purpose of their site (which was first founded in October 2023) is to help people discover smaller sites. By being in the top 8, this will force people to click on their site and look at the lesser known sites that tend to get ignored here. Now while the project sounds great on paper, but how they did is…questionable.

Like they often change how they summit new websites such as when they first started out, they put various people’s button and website on their project by themselves (which is how my website got put there in the first place). Then they changed it to where you have to fill out a form and made sure you have a button for your website, up and ready to go. Then they like to keep moving the deadlines for submitting your website to them. And right before the drama happened; people were actually begging them on their profile page to be featured on their website and they would approve the person on site! You can kind of see there’s some red flags due to how they manage the project.

Around March, they made an announcement that will decide the future of their website on April 8th. Of course, people got nervous over the fact and wondered what they meant by that. Then they did an April’s Fool prank on their site by closing the site and replaced it with a 3D model of their mascots spinning around, which made some people angry and some even started to questioned the project, itself.

April 8th came around and made the announcement that have some mixed reactions. At first, I thought what they did is clever and it’ll help get smaller sites get recognized. But in the next few days, people were starting to have second doubts on the project and were voicing their thoughts and complaints on federiefederi’s profile page. Then they made a poll about if people would leave the project; they were blocked and removed without warning. I think that rubbed people the wrong way.

Then on April 14th, that’s when the drama started where people were complaining on federiefederi’s profile page that they want everyone to do a “follow for follow” on their site, in order to increase their view count, which people refused to do. I actually had to look up the term since I never heard it before (I’m old) and of course, there’s an Urban Dictionary article for the term! And it’s not a good one. I think that was the moment people started to lose respect for federiefederi as they think the site have lost their main purpose of the project as they rather chase down the numbers than help people get discovered.

This caused people to start posting on federiefederi’s profile page that they want their button and website, removed from their website. That include several people that I followed on my profile. One of them not only have over 100,000 views on their own website, but an hour after posting their departure, it had over 12 likes on their post! That’s when you know that you messed up, BADLY!!!

That was when I started to panic and thought to myself, maybe it’s time for me to leave and bounce off of this trainwreck. I did that by not only unfollowing them, but also announcing that I want MY button and website removed as well! I remembered seeing my post getting 15 likes (which include the people who were following me) before they deleted mine (and the others) departing post. Bastards. Afterwards, I unlinked and delete their button and website off from my Cool Links page due to me losing all respect for them.

After I unfollowed federiefederi, I heard the site start getting real salty over the situation and even got into fights with random people in the comments! That’s when I had to BLOCK them in hope I don’t see them in my activity feed, where someone I follow might post something on their page. It didn’t, so I end up having to stay away from my feed for a day or so until things have calmed down a bit.

What’s happening to them made me remember about what happened to the Yesteryear webring, where around same time last year, the group crashed and burned after getting too big and too fast, that they didn’t have enough moderation on their Discord page and that some even complain that the Discord was shoving their left-wing political views, down in their throats. I don’t know. I wasn’t there when it happened. But I do know it caused one of the founders of that webring to flee Neocities after the webring shut down. It wasn’t until last month when they finally came back, under a new name and a new layout theme.

Well, I don’t know how long federiefederi is going to last here now thanks to their questionable management. They did achieve their goal of getting into the top 8 here, but will it be worth it at the end? Not really as 2 days after all this blew up, their website is gone. Damn, I didn’t expect the backlash to be that bad, but it did. And they’ll been only around for almost 6 months too! Funny thing is that they knew what they’re about to do is going to backfire on them. I didn’t expect them to give in so quickly! I’ll miss their quirky mascots thought...

Or did they as after I post this, someone in the comments told me that they got BANNED instead for scamming people for making them do the follow for follow thing! Hmmm....

Don’t know man. I just want to get away from the social media drama that is notoriously bad. Now I’m hearing that there some shit going on Nekoweb, a hosting site that I flirt time to time and thought about making a website there. My website that I was going to post there was going be Windows 7 themed, but everything else is mirrored from Neocities. I might stay away from them now, depending how bad the drama is over there.

Look, I want to make a nice looking website (I’m even making plans to upgrade my website as of right now), but not deal with some unnecessary Internet drama around here!

Sigh…