title: It's our responsibility to keep I2P properly gatekept
author: 寮
date: 2023-01-11
tags: technology,darknet,i2p,internet
----
We failed to gatekeep the clearnet, we failed to gatekeep Tor, and we're on the brink of failing to gatekeep I2P too now.\
Fediverse is quite interesting, because it has kind of west-east divide with the FediBlock wall preventing the one side to come into the other side.\
Which I'm totally fine with, because the trash has its own space, and the cool kids have their own spaces.\
But the bigger problem is the Elon refugees from Shitter trying to infect both sides, and while the cool kids side has seemingly learnt their lesson and took them only 2 days to get them to fuck off.\
On the opposite side of the iron curtain the parasites are having a great time infecting the Fediverse with nobody willing to fight back because "you'll be just as bad as them", or "gatekeeping is REEEECIST!!", or "we have the moral high ground"/"we are on the right side of history", well all I can say is, you're getting the community you fucking ask for!\
IRC and XMPP are another interesting one, these don't need any gatekeeping because all the bad actors are on Discucked, Matrix, WhatsApp, LINE, Telegram, Signal, or some other bloated, and none of them are even willing to give IRC or XMPP a try because "too difficult".

And to keep I2P great, we'll need a similar barrier of entry, if not higher for I2P.\
Back in the old days when the clearnet was the only internet, you had to know how to set up a computer and internet connection before you could actually start using it.\
Even in my [IRC server](http://chikahiroba.i2p/) we're in disagreement over this, because one side says "we need more people because muh bandwidth", while the other side can see how the quality of the network got greatly reduced since Mental Outlaw started making videos about I2P.

Meanwhile, I2P devs, the Jewva, i2pd, and I2P+ included, all decided to lower the barrier of entry to providing browser bundles.\
Terrible idea!\
Those of us who are already using it already know how to set it up, which already is very easy, but hard enough for the normalfags to stay out.\
What we need is not to lower the barrier of entry, but to keep it as high as it was before the browser bundles, or perhaps raise that barrier.\
This isn't about making money, this is about preserving a culture, in which case catering to a wider audience only results in disaster.

## Cycle Of Community Koolness (COCK)

Every community goes through a cycle of 6 stages, but this cycle is different from any other cycles, because this one does have an end, and this one also has a break.\
I'll call each stage, from early to late, hobby, attention, backstab, business, outrage, and collapse.

In the hobby stage, it's just a hobby.\
Everyone contributes because they like it, they want to make it great, participants are indifferent because we all share a common hobby which we genuinely like, and all consoomers are also prodoocers.\
Every successful community stops growing at this stage of the cycle, no exception.

In the attention stage, contributors decide it's time to make their hobby known to a "wider audience", and promote it everywhere.\
That's when the normies find their way into the hobby.\
The normies will soon complain about how difficult everything is, and will demand it to be adjusted to their level.\
Meanwhile, the normies show they have no intention of contributing anything, they're only here to consoom.\
This is the stage I2P is currently in.

In the backstab stage, the contributors are being thrown out of their own community, the normies take over, and tell the original contributors they're no longer welcome.\
This stage comes as soon as the barrier of entry has been lowered all the way down.\
This is also the stage where censorship starts to arrise.\
Examples of this are Void Linux, Tor, and Pleroma.\
Some communities will decide to go underground to continue their hobbies back at the hobby stage with no plans of going any further than that, for example western comics with Comicsgate, Rebase/Soapbox as a fork of Pleroma, and OpenBSD as a fork of NetBSD.

In the business stage, it's no longer about the passion, it's now about the money.\
Contributors are now considered employees.\
For the original contributors this is the last chance to break away and return to the hobby stage, if done early.\
Meanwhile, censorship is getting rampant, and censors more depending on the investors' current hate.\
Examples of this are JewTube, Discucked (very close to the outrage stage now), much of the indie game devs (the bigger ones only, the small ones are still doing fine), Ubuntu, and Manjaro.

In the outrage stage, the business is getting greedy and is trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator just to milk as many people as possible.\
Ironically, by doing so they're inviting the very people who are only going to join to hate, and while the normies have already kicked out the hobbyists, those hate mobs will kick out all the normies as well as the current employees along the way.\
At this stage the "community" has reached a point of no return; anyone who got kicked out during any of the previous stages or otherwise left are not going to come back, as they already established a new community in parallel, or otherwise found something else they like more now.\
Among the normies there might be some people left who will cuck out until they too burn out, everyone else has already burnt out and are looking for something new to enjoy, as it's very unlikely they'll be allowed into the geeky hobbyist communities now that the geeks have learnt their lesson and gatekeep the hell out of their replacement communities.\
Meanwhile, censorship gets more and more rampant, it's going out of control even, and it's starting to eat itself.\
Examples are the AAA game industry, microblogging, the clearnet, and Comiket.\
Japanese animation is among the endangered spicies here, as it's balancing between the hobby, backstab, and outrage stages depending on the franchise.

In the collapse stage, it's just game over, the community is now owacon.\
Nobody wants to have anything to do with it anymore, and eventually might end up memory holed.\
For example MySpace, Dreamcast, Hollywood, western comics, and Skype.\
Soyny and Fakebook will be added to this list very soon it seems.

## Higher barriers of entry keeps the cancer away

At the beginning I mentioned IRC and XMPP.\
The chat community is a great example of that.\
IRC and XMPP are both too hard for normies to understand, and it should stay that way.\
Normies are all on Discucked, Matrix, Telegram, and so on.\
This guarantees that both XMPP and IRC remain cancerfree for the unforseeable future.\
The normies and outrage mobs already have countless of options, us nerds have 2, or 3 if you count Mumble too for voice chats.

Same thing I hope for I2P to happen; keep I2P nerdy, the normies already have Tor, and the hate mobs already have the clearnet.\
There's no reason we should share a space with them!
