When you are mostly just shown content that you’ve agreed to see, there’s less of an issue when you see something that offends your particular sensibilities, values, etc. because you agreed to see it, or you went looking for it.
But when the potential content you’ll see can include literally anything, there is a real incentive for the platform to make that content as neutral as possible. Because if you’re shown something that you really don’t like, you’ll stop scrolling and the engagement stats will go down.
We're in bubbles everywhere now. Enforced by mods and payment processors and social networks. I'm now much more careful about what I post online. We don't have an actual public square to discuss things.
I got shadow banned on Duolingo forums for questioning why a billion dollar company was not paying some of the people who helped develop their language courses.
I live in the Netherlands- a country that prises itself in hyper individuality. It can be a little tiring but never boring. People here are born without filters. Cold, blunt, callous, rude, insulting but always free.
I didn't know you could get arrested for possessing a half ounce of blur, but here we are in 2026.
It is an interesting use case to monitor because there are obvious need for something like crypto, but so that has not come close to taking hold.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24452/w244...
the advertising industry in general is a plague on a great many things, in the current instance of late stage capitalism we exist in.
I've never seen someone actually get blocked on Bluesky, but post filters do block things the Puritan American media would dislike by default. Blowing people up is fine but nipples aren't, same with any social media site, really.
Payment processors getting into the whole thing is gross, though. I wish cryptocurrency was good for more than just speculation, gifting, and crime. Maybe when the mythical Digital Euro comes, which is supposed to be a self-managed cryptocurrency wallet system tied to real money, we'll be able to get over Mastercard and Visa.
What if there was a massage parlor downstairs, perfectly legal and allowed, which marketed and sent wealthy patrons upstairs?
But whatever. Aside from the slippery slope argument of OnlyFans which I guess can be dispelled, I think using the raccoons for broader appeal and calling porn "queer" is poor.
Even less popular: I think there's a simple business argument to credit card companies and regulating porn. The sector has way higher fraud, disputes and chargebacks.
If only crypto was actually used as intended...
I do wonder how easy is it for buisnesses, that only accept crypto (lets say monero), to turn it back into fiat, and how willing are regular people to set up and acquire crypto to pay.
As for a universal social media platform, that used to exist. It was called "webrings". Every website would link to other websites they vouched for, so you could browse around them, and sign up for those you liked by clicking a single button on your browser of choice, adding it to your RSS feeds, after which you'd be notified whenever a creator you subscribed to posted something new.
Most of that died when Google decided to oppose RSS as a public-facing feature, and pressured Firefox in doing the same. So nowadays it suffers from the same networking effects problem crypto does.
The whole thing is deliberately engineered to centralize decision-making in the hands of as few people as possible, aka elites, and, through that, to steer most of the masses in whatever direction most benefits those elites.
That leaves two key issues: getting paid, and discovery.
Getting paid (at a minimum, enough to cover hosting bandwidth and art supplies, but I like to dream some artists earn at least a tiny bit from their work) works now but is VERY fragile. Just a couple of vendors offer mostly-not-censored payment services (eg: Patreon) and if they stopped due to pressure from credit card networks, governments, or billionaires it would be difficult to replace them.
As for discovery, we need to build platforms that aren't the major social networks that can help audiences find new comics. This is a fairly easy problem to solve.
I was initially going to check and see if they had any presence on the Fediverse. While it doesn't solve the payment processor issues at the moment, I think web comics could find an audience there with less threat of censorship, albeit a smaller one.
As I understand it, money is the core of it. Everything else would be accessory if the payment processor part got solved.
If only every third NSFW-artist from tumble migrated into the fediverse, the audience would follow and maybe even lead some of the other artists to join as well.
The usual solution is to put conspicuous censorship markers over everything the platform finds objectionable and then let the audience know where they can buy the uncensored edition.
Same almost happened with Bluesky later at much smaller scale due to skepticism and again moderation happened.
That's why Twitter reigns supreme.
... and at least a fair few fediverse instances, especially ones based in Europe, would defederate with NSFW friendly instances in order to stay compliant with relevant laws.
Even in the extreme, theoretical case of full defederation you could just browse your communities by having a sperate account on every relevant server using a multi-account client.
> La tienda en línea ha sido suspendida momentáneamente
> Si es tuya y quieres reactivarla, entra a tu Administrador Nube.
> ---
> The online store has been momentarily suspended
> If it's yours and you want to reactivate it, go to your Cloud Manager.
Edit: I'm assuming they were using some kind of site builder with ecommerce functionality, I know that some small creators use their site at least in part for merch, sometimes entirely.
> "Hazel (the artist) and Bell (the writer) are an English-speaking duo behind the webcomics "Electric Bones" and "Always Raining Here". "Always Raining Here" is a Canadian slice of life romance published in 2025 by First Second books and is now available in bookstores across Canada. Hazel and Bell have been working together since 2011, with a focus on telling stories set in their home province of British Columbia."
I wonder if it's something region specific.
The only thing that actually seems to be an issue here is the credit card processors.
It’s not a matter of censorship, it’s a matter of taste.
> restrictions from payment providers are making sharing queer stories online even harder.
But along with that, if they are making decisions, they should be held to account for what they do allow.
I don't want to see furry smut either, but for fucks sake I think that everyone should be able to pay money to their favorite furry smut artists if they want to. Credit card processors should only be allowed to refuse transactions if they actively break a law.
Other than that though, I think platforms should be free to ban smut if they want. I’ve abandoned several sites over time because they became inundated with cartoon smut, which I am not interested in.
While I agree on principle, I also see the dangers of platforms caving before Evangelical pressure campaigns. And once this is established, the threshold to cross from "ban furry smut" to "ban anything even smelling like LGBT" is much much thinner. My personal patience with and trust in platforms to behave sanely is all but gone.
Coincidence? I think not.
And if you do comics that size, please think of the poor laptop/desktop users and lay out more on one line...
School libraries were always censored heavily.
Using online payment processing for censoring is a separate issue that unfortunately comes up heavily (money is supposed to be neutral as long as its used legally), but they shouldn't be mixed together with the school library question.