While I've vastly already lowered my outwardly-public sides to being in the community over the years for various reasons, I was honestly going to wait until it was the 20th anniversary of me being here later this year to make more of a concious decision on how much of my life was going to be taken up by this...but then other factors came in and kinda made me have to make decisions sooner.

Namely, 1) I'm done with social media.

I do not count FA as social media, so this isn't affecting this site specifically (which is ironic given I had times I've fallen out with FA a touch to a point of wanting to distance but I guess, no one likes to try other platforms unless REALLY strongarmed into it, eh?) but in terms of more conventional social media sites like Bluesky and what was before Bluesky? Yeah, I'm truly done.

I was harrassed last week. I will spare you the details of why and who, I had talked about it on my Bluesky enough while trying to emotionally navigate it (and would really rather not talk about too much of the specifics anymore) but I'll say that its someone who has been harrassing others by using the loosest excuses pertaining to a controversial subsection of the community whose admins are deservedly villified for their abusive behaviours to target people they personally don't like for whatever reason. I guess their "whatever reason" for me was speaking out and saying such behaviours shouldn't be encouraged while being clear that the problem actors that WERE proven to be legitimately terrible deserved the concequences.

I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with the main facets of what this person was going after, I just didn't want them to keep using it as an excuse to hurt other people who *aren't* those abusers just because placing the worst words to describe people nearby other people's names means they're guarenteed hell for the rest of their lives, apparently.

I lived through the 2000's internet at a time when I maybe shouldn't of been so involved in community stuff. I feel endlessly disgusted that we're tetering back on the edge of how the climate of participating online felt then because some people feel so emboldened to thinking they're the Main Characters of the Universe that they have the authority and right to wrongly assume things about others yet still be treated as if they're right.

It doesn't matter if its Bluesky or Twitter or anywhere else, no matter how improved the platform is. If people will still bring their terrible habits with them to these other places, after many years of getting clearly reminded that their negative behaviours have concequences and they cannot live off ruining other peoples' lives while having a healthy existence themselves (periods of time where I'd like to think most people would actually internalise what went wrong and learn/grow from these things), then eventually as soon as they have a sense of power alloted to them they'll drag everyone else down.

I don't want to spend my time via this presence here worrying about my "social capital" anymore. I regret that outright. But when someone goes to the trouble of trying to pull the kind of garbage I was handed, without intentionally provoking the person beforehand, those fears of the validity of whatever my "social capital" is comes back as a means of ensuring that I'm not only ensuring others are safe, but myself. It's exhausting and, look...time doesn't stop for anybody. There's no pause button. We're all getting older. Every second passes by. The older I'm getting, the faster time is moving...therefore, I have to put my foot down on how I interact with these facets of the net and stop actively participating.

I may still use a platform or two that counts as social media to browse. To see what others are up to, to see art they've made if they don't do FA, etc. But I'm going to make, like...two or three final posts on Bluesky and that's it indefinitely. (More on what those are later)

Still deciding on what to do with Mastodon, as that's the one social media platform I think I'd be the most comfortable using but feels like only 6 people I know (tops) uses. Because of factors that're going to be talked about momentarily, I may make moves to change instances in case it helps anything but until I have definite proof that more than those 6 people I know use Mastodon so I could make the move easier, that too'll proberbly go quiet.

I don't think the world needs a Twitter 2, I feel too many people need to fix their hearts before we even get the privellege of a Twitter 2...OR, that and they massively revamp what a social media platform is for and what benefits people would get from them to be better concious of people's boundaries and sense of emotional safety. Either way, I'm done with that.

But also, even if I wasn't done with social media... 2) How the internet is going to be used in the UK is going to change for the worst tomorrow (25th July 2025)

I don't know what made me feel worse, the fact this is happening so soon in the way that it is or the fact that there's *shit-all* notice about this in the press or many other places outside of those looking for them...but there's an Online Safety Act that was voted for in 2023 that has been approved to go into effect tomorrow, as I type this...and other than certain actions I'm taking to ensure I can still comfortably use the internet with (hopefully) less compromise as a result, how things will roll out and go into effect from tomorrow is currently a nervous mystery.

Thing is, this is a Class A example of taking something with agreeable and acceptable moral justifications on the surface but when you look deeper is actually something far more sinister and seems much more concerned with shuttering innocent free expression while keeping files on almost every UK resident with online access than its supposed goals: to protect children from age-inappropriate material online.

Between that and the bullcrap happening with certain credit card companies, it's been an exhaustingly nervous time for everybody who just wants to exist innocently without the looming sense of surveillance and "how much my existence is allowed by what the powers that be view as right". I have sent an e-mail to my MP about my concerns, I have signed the petition on GOV.UK's petitioning site to repel the Act and I've taken some general steps in the hopes that things go okay without things getting even more strange, limiting and scary...but otherwise, I've done all I can.

This isn't all regarding how the Act works but the biggest concern for me is this: online-using people who are 18+ in the UK have to, according to this Act, send photos of their ID or a face-scan of themselves to a third-party "age assurance" company before they can view things deemed to be "age-inappropriate" (and due to how social media automates these things, this can range from "yes, this makes perfect sense to block for under-18s" to "huh, guess it's about THAT instead for this, isn't it?"), sometimes can't even be allowed to have DMs with others without going through this process.

The services running this stuff, or at least two of the most popular ones I've seen, are no-name upstart Persona and...Epic Games???! Via something they're calling Kids Web Services????! Like, the same Epic Games that is routinely criticized for virtually extorting children out of their and their parents' money for cosmetics in violent video games, that Epic Games???! What the HELL is even happening anymore?

Anyway, both of those services do not have the necessary transparency required to comfortably be rewarded with trust from me on such highly-sensitive data that they expect way more than half of the entire country to just...hand over. Imagine if either of their servers got a data leak, like...we'd be fucked. Really, really fucked. So while I'm not leaving FA, I'm bracing myself a little just in case they too have to suffer this Blighty blight that's about to consume many other sites and services...

...and that is, I'm retooling the "Infnifennec" site to be my primary creative portal for my presence here from now on!

Now, I'm not ruling out the "Infinifennec" comic project itself yet as I feel it might still be a fun and sweet venture if my time and energy allows (and if my normie-r projects don't get off the ground so much, shhh) but I figured centering those times I decide to tinker with this stuff on a site that I'm the one and only person behind will elimate a lot of issues I have with sharing this stuff in the community: I will no longer be pressured to specifically "front" for anybody I don't want to "front" for, I won't be constrained by the website's own limitations of style, I should have my own agency on how I curate the stuff I put out and it'll feel more like a Plus if anybody else cares rather than the point.

I was introduced to Neocities through  xinjinmeng's site and overtime, it just made more and more sense for me to do this...and makes much more sense as a means to combat this kind of exhausting atmosphere modern social media has given us in place of what Neocities was set up initially as a harkback to: allowing individuals to have their own presence online centered around themselves as people and their interests, not as just one more Number in a vast crowd trying to stand out in the hunt for validation.

As always, by the very clear basic terms of what defines something as so-called "age-inappropriate" or not, I don't intend on ever making anything that's not that. I've never posted any art on the public net that was directly sexual and am thoroughly uninterested in doing so in the future. If you could put an MPAA rating on the stuff I make, it makes more sense for it to be thought of as PG-13 rather than R. I'm here to creatively express things that're harder elsewhere while hopefully being validating to the far larger folk in the world that my characters may be similar to. I will make this clear as can be on the site itself once it's further along enough to say it's properly "live" but I mean...Neocities doesn't rely on automation to classify if something's a "moral good" or not so I'm confident that the way I catagorize these things won't be misinterpreted by those who care.

So, here's the plan going forward:
- When the Infinifennec site goes officially "live", I will have that be my main creative portal for the stuff I do around these parts.
- For as long as FA doesn't crap the bed in regards to stuff I mentioned regarding that Act, I will post many newer stuff I do on that site to here as well.
- I will stop using Bluesky as an active poster after 2-3 more posts that'll mainly just be echoes of what I talked about here, barring one final post for when the Infinifennec site goes live.
- I'll also no longer be an active poster on social media through this presence in general, unless Mastodon proves to have usable merit beyond itself as a platform.

This will free me of a lot of pressure that comes with being a part of stuff lately so the times I participate here remain fun rather than exhausting, while hopefully cultivating my own site for my own creative works will allow me to define my own stuff free from close-minded assumptions wether internal or external.

Once again, I do not know how the second part of my reasonings for these big sweeping changes are going to affect things come tomorrow. I did my best to research this once I knew it was happening and it barely helped clear any fears I had...but for now, I'm doing what I can with what I feel is currently possible as someone who just wants to creatively express non-sexual things to those who understand and relate to them without being hounded at as something I'm not from people who'll always refuse to understand and who don't deserve my energy.

And hey, just in case, thanks to everybody who has ever supported me and continues to over these more than 19 years. Whatever happens with how much or how little I still interact around here, I'll always be grateful for the things that helped me both creatively and personally and appreciate everybody who thinks time spent with me is still time worth spending.

- Nell/Alek

INFINIFENNEC WEBSITE (currently still under construction): https://infinifennec.neocities.org/

P.S. UK folk reading this who now seem concerned, I urge you all to sign this petition so that this Act is held back from fully going into effect:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
It's still more than halfway close to its goal of 100,000 signatures, that'll enable this subject to be discussed in Parliament on the grounds of how much harm it could do if utilised as badly as people fear so...yeah, please sign it!

And I also encourage people to e-mail their MPs about this. To find out who your MP is: https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP
To find out also if they voted for the Online Safety Act, or at least its current form as it'll be enacted tomorrow: https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/c...../division/1926

Take care and good luck, everybody.