Any place with anonymous/ephermal account and posts as the default is going to attract the worst people in the world....
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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While we all know you’re correct the sheer number of memes that can trace their origins to 4chan shows that anonymous, ephemeral content is pretty powerful.
and you can just have stricter rules!! it's not impossible!
Tbf if you do have stricter rules the cesspit people would just move on
federated boards and servers with stricter rules against hate speech would make moderation better
I agree, I actually have been wanting a 4chan type replacement for a while and I believe there are enough tools out there with a federated space for it to be possible. 4chan’s method of communication in the best of times is fun and spurs some interesting conversations, when it’s done right. I think we all know what 4chan does wrong, mostly its lack of any noticeable moderation or automods.
If it had the same type of moderation tools that say BlueSky had though, where things like misinformation, slurs, etc. are removed/hidden as the default setting for users. Then this would go a long ways to building a kinder community/discussion space.
How exactly? You can't just say "better because fedi", that's a non-answer.
stricter rules per instance is self explanatory, and moderation would be spread out more
We basically already have that here with how effortless it is to make accounts
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IIRC, someone was talking about their p2p text only 4chan clone recently. I forget what it was called though.
Edit: found it.
talking about seedit? also p2p has too many issues for a social platform
What problems?
needing to store everything on and transmit everything from user devices is kind of crazy for a social media. fine for messaging and file sharing, but social media works better when there's a place for the content to actually be stored and accessed from (preferably multiple communicative places!)
Well, plebbit being text-only means exactly that any media content is being stored remotely on CDNs
I think I was thinking of plebchan. From what I can tell, it's based off plebbit, which looks to be the same stack that seedit uses.
ie. topic boards with ephemeral linear message threads
This describes a general forum format, but you might mean chan imageboards specifically. There have been federated imageboards for a while, but they're very niche and experimental and I don't see the value. The two examples I've heard of are NNTPchan (2015-present, NNTP protocol) and Fchannel (ActivityPub protocol).
There's the related imageboard webring, but there's no actual federated interaction between the boards, it's effectively just cross-advertising to allow easier discovery.
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If they are anonymous, they would get defederated extremely quickly.
Probably if you called it "fedi imageboard" it wouldn't get such a negative reaction.
true but probably wouldnt have gotten much reaction at all
Can't someone just make a lemmy frontend that does this?
yeah could probably get something close. main differences would be chronological comments, ephemeral threads, and anonymous posting
What's ephemeral about 4chan? (I've never used it)
Anyplace that allows, or in the case of 4chan, encourages purely Anon posting is going to be a cesspit. When there's no accountability, no ID of any sort (even a screen name) to tie actions against then there's no reputation to protect. It might be pleasant at first, but you can bet it won't stay that way for long.
you can make anonymous accounts for free on fedi, the best way to deal with it in both cases is to block tor and IP ban. either way i think freeze peach folks will avoid any platform with "woke" rules
You have got to be an absolute newfriend if you think that shit works at all even for 4chan itself.
aye, but it's content moderation in general. you can anonymize yourself easily on any platform, 4chan just attracts worse people because of the existing culture
You can make anonymous accounts, but there's a difference between 'breadguy' and 'anon'. Who is literally everyone posting on the board. In the chan world so called namefags are shunned and not thought of as true channers. By having an identifiable name it gives you some measure of reputation, a name that you may hold some regard for, or at least that others could decide if they want to listen to or block.
I actually like to think of the chan boards as an experiment in social studies. What happens when you allow for purely repression and repercussion free interaction? There are plenty of people who will say and do some absurd things when they're drunk that they wouldn't dare to sober. What happens when that sense of untouchability is available at any time just by going to a website.
that's true, but that's also a culture thing. also I could spin up an account called 2567888654212255788@ sh.itjust.works with an email alias in a minute. at the end of the day it comes down to content moderation which is difficult regardless
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If it has the BlueSky moderation tools I think that could go a long ways to keeping it a pleasant place. Quality moderators can help steer the culture of the boards as well.
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Well... Lemmy?
yeah like lemmy but different
I mean if everything is ephemeral and the users are anonymous and don't log in, the federation wouldn't actually do anything.
4chan's style as a concept doesn't work too well with the concepts of the rest of the fediverse. There's no benefit to federating anonymous image and text posts across multiple servers and merging those feeds together. Especially if the content is meant to be ephemeral, why are you wasting bandwidth replicating it? Hell, with the average lemmy server's replication delay the original content would be gone before it could replicate anywhere.
There'd also be no reason for each "instance" to not be its own separate entity with no federation. It's not like 4chan really does crossposting between boards, you just can link between them.
Also, having spent far more time on the chans than is in any way healthy, there still isn't any real solution for good or consistent moderation. Federation doesn't inherently make moderation better or easier, if anything it complicates things in that regard.
Edit, additional info: Certain threads on /vg/ have been dealing with their own thread specific trolls for literal years with no mod action. Some of the threads have figured out rough schedules of mods based off what type of shit gets removed and when.
Federation is not a magical pill for better quality. I direct you to explodingheads, or plenty of other examples of shit instances documented by fediseer.
How would you federate something ephemeral? I'll admit I don't understand the specific techinals of federation but what stops another platform from hosting your content locally after it has supposed to have been deleted? It seems like the two goals of the platforms are diametrically opposed
having a unified frontend for boards on different servers and you could still have accounts
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Make one if you want that. I doubt many adults are going to make a 4chan clone and deal with all that comes with it.
No offense. I’m just saying 4chan is toxic and bad and and there’s not a lot of experienced developers hoping to recreate it when we can just take a shit on the sidewalk and accomplish more in less time.
youre really smart
Thank you. I have a masters in headassery from the Advanced School of Clowning at Bologna. And I interned at the Milan Dick Sucking Factory, which is where I met your parents.
that's awesome
It’s not a conventional career path but what is in these times of change?
werewolf stud
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I think there is quite some overlap with Lemmy. You can do images and threads here. And they even show up in a tree-like structure. I'm not sure about ephermal, I don't think Lemmy is as advanced. But other Fedi software have ephemeral posts.
So, given your requirements, I'd say this is that place. Communities would be your topic boards, and posts would be the threads. And user accounts and moderation would be the improvements to make it less toxic.
Activitypub is user based, it's not built to support anonymous accounts.
easily circumvented with temp accounts per thread (ie. [random string]@ instance.domain)
Sure, but what would be the purpose of using activitypub then if it isn't publishing someone's activity.
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