The Future of the Ephebo Blogsphere
What happened so far?
Some of you might have noticed that Nibblebit — which was the hope of all the bloggers who saw their blogs getting deleted by Blogger/Blogspot, Tumblr and even SensualWriter – started to reject blogs with even G-rated pictures of teenagers. Here is what happened: Someone filed a complaint about a blog hosted at Nibblebit which contained child porn (while that can be a fully dressed 17 year old in a “suggestive pose” nowadays) with Nibblebit’s hosting company which caused the latter to suspend Nibblebit’s server affecting not only the blog in question but all blogs hosted by Nibblebit. Nibblebit switched to another hosting company and while they were not able to recover the data of the old blogs most bloggers there restarted their blogs just to find out that Nibblebit doesn’t allow them to run boy-related blogs anymore.
I’m not sure if that leaves Nibblebit with any blogs at all since pretty much all of them where blogs about boys in one way or another. But however, personally I won’t miss Nibblebit: The service was always full of annoying ads and I even read quite a few reports about people who got a virus through the obviously not so well checked ads there. The more interesting question here is where the now homeless bloggers will end up. At least the ones who are not silly enough to try to open such blogs at Blogger/Blogspot over and over again will have to find a new place to host their blogs eventually. Read on...
What now?
People asked me if I’m willing to host some of the former Nibblebit blogs but as much as I wish i could there answer here has to be no. I share the views of most of you who think that the laws about what “child porn” is nowadays (see above) are totally bizarre and just wrong but I can’t change these laws and have to live with them. Many of the blogs at Nibblebit were pretty lax about photos of naked teens. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate any anarchistic twist around the laws Christian fundamentalists are forcing upon us but to be completely honest with you… I don’t really believe that most of the bloggers posted these boy dicks as a fuck you to the governments and obedient industry but just because some of them didn’t realise yet that we don’t live in the 70’s anymore where naked 14 year olds were a usual sight in mainstream gay magazines. And I don’t really want to put the milkboys server at any risk by hosting blogs with such sensitive content – especially considering the fact that this server is paid with donations of faithful community members. This would be just unfair towards them, don’t you think?
The future
So, where should you go if you want to run a picture blog about boys? There is no easy answer here. While it was never easy to get away with such a blog at services like WordPress.com or Tumblr it’s getting actually worse recently. Blogger even started to remove plain gay blogs who had not a single picture of anyone who looks even remotely close to being underage. This is where we’re heading. Our Western societies are becoming more and more hysterical about everything related to sex and this will make it even harder to blog about a topic that might be related to sex or can potentially get connected to this subject by others. Parents in the UK are not allowed to watch their children at the playground anymore because they are seen as potential child molesters and you think you can blog about teen boys without getting accused of being a rapist? Ha.
The last chance I see right now is The Pirate Bay. They have a blogging service called BayWords which claims to be open to everyone whatever they want to blog about as long as it is legal. Now The Pirate Bay guys are known for having another definition of legal than our governments so you might actually be able to run and, most importantly, keep your blog there if you don’t turn it into a pedo haven (just don’t post photos of little Russian boy “models” in underwear, that’s downright disgusting anyways). But of course there are downsides: 1. You get only 100 MB webspace for your blog which means you will have to host your photos somewhere else eventually. And you don’t even wanna try to host pictures of boys on crappy sites like PhotoBucket, TinyPic or ImageShack, they get deleted before you can shout “But these pics are perfectly legal!” (they don’t care). There is a Pirate Bay service for this too – but BayImg isn’t really famous for its reliability. And 2. you never know how long one of the many side projects of The Pirate Bay stays alive. They are in legal trouble all the time and no one knows how long they can fight back as successful as they do at the moment.
I don’t know about any boy blogs at BayWords yet so if you should decide to try them you are welcome to share your experiences in the milkboard. Feel also free to add any suggestions or views on the topics in the comments below.
about 4 months ago
I’ve actually started a blog at BayWords ( http://bardaghdavid.baywords.com/ ), although I haven’t done too much with it as of yet. Unless I’m just missing the “how-to” completely (very possible), many of the “widgets” that we’re used to having with the various WordPress blogs aren’t functional at BayWords: I can’t get the Friends Connect or CBox things to work, for example.
As I did with Nibblebit, I’m keeping the images absolutely legal (faces, almost exclusively), but, as you say, even those can somehow be twisted into being “pornographic.” We’ll see how it goes!
about 4 months ago
Well how interesting this is getting to be ! On one hand you have this Great Awaking about being Gay and Gay Rights
etc. but on the other hand one person somewhere in this whole big world yell`s PORN and untold amount of blogs
and pics are gone !
Quite frankly, I seem to think that something unseen is going on here something insideous, I think. I`m not really smart
enough to be able to connect the dots on this but I do have a bad feeling about it.
about 4 months ago
If you don’t pay for a blog, they drop you fast. Free blogs are tolerated for the chance of listing advertisements that the parent hosting company benefits from. Your supplying them with web traffic in exchange for free web hosting. Your a supplemental paycheck. If a non-paying blogger does something out of line, they protect the paycheck and delete the bog in question.
about 4 months ago
Forgot to add something:
If you own the content of your blog, like picture, they rethink the complaint. The most common way to get deleted is copyright issues. Post only your own pictures. If a complaint about the pictures is made, they might first contact you with a warning. All depends on the theme of the blog. If someone from home town USA is showing pictures of his shirtless kids playing in the yard, why would they delete them. But a blog showing 100% shirtless teens with sexual comments being made, your gone.
i’ve had plenty of web pages deleted. There is always another free one someplace.
Don’t sweat the petty things. Don’t pet the sweaty things.
about 4 months ago
You need to get a thorough review of the laws before any towels are thrown in. In my state the courts have said that it is not pornographic to publish a picture of a naked child unless he/she is aroused or erotically posed.
about 4 months ago
The trouble is that the internet is a worldwide phenomenon and not just restricted to your state. While “you” may be safe from prosecution in your home state the server may reside in a country or place with more restrictive laws and be dealt with there.
Where I live even drawings of bart Simpson nude is considered child porn :(
What a sad society we live in.
about 4 months ago
“… or erotically posed.”
That is the problem, isn’t it? It may sound harmless, but at least in Sweden several sites that host pictures of completely dressed kids are being blocked on similar grounds. This shows that abstract concepts can be interpreted in the most unique ways.
I’ve possibly decided to start a blog on BayWords (without any dirty kiddyporn, mind you), so keep yer eyers an’ earrs opin!
about 4 months ago
The worst part, the part that really sickens me, is that today, sex is viewed as disgusting, terrible, and sinful, while violence, war, and murder are often viewed as the lesser of two evils -sometimes to the extent where violence is considered a good idea. This notion is so backwards, and so utterly disgusting that it seems nigh on impossible to understand why anyone would think in such a way.
about 4 months ago
I’ve had issues with posting images of anime shota previously. SiteNames and PowWeb both dropped me as a paying customer because of complaints they got of the anime. I never ever posted images of real people. Currently I host my site with GoDaddy and I’m sure they’ve gotten complaints as well. It’s so easy for someone to lodge one and feel they are doing “God’s Work” but so far after about two years I haven’t been knocked down again yet.
I guess what I’m saying is that you aren’t even safe if you buy your own domain, your own hosting, and post images of non-real boys.
The Wild West days of the internets are pretty much over and it makes me sad.
about 4 months ago
GoDaddy is notorious for deleting anyhting and everything ofr whatever reason. The nly upside to using them -at least in my experience- is that they don’t actively monitor content on sites that they host -or at least they didn’t when I used them. Another alternative is to buy/build your own server and then host out of your home, but thats just too expensive for most.
about 4 months ago
Only difficulty with doing it this way is publishing your hostname/IP address, which can be done using something like dynip.com
A server doesn’t have to be anything much, but then your bandwidth is probably going to get muched very quickly….
but you STILL have to connect to the net via someone who can – and WILL – cut you off the second a complaint comes in… your ISP
about 4 months ago
Aaahh the ’70’s, sigh.I couldn’t set up a magazine now called L’adolescent! Even Flickr, closed an account of mine, and I closed a second one, being pissed off with them. I asked why I was always classed as unsafe, they replied some of my images were close to creepy! With the porn that’s on there, I though this a bit rich.
about 4 months ago
Heh, indeed–you could ask them to define the legal status of “creepy.” But again, you wouldn’t make a dent in them. They are free to act on their prejudices, and without the excluded minorities having any recourse…
about 4 months ago
Won’t it be ironic when the freeest places for expression on the Web and Internet are in Russia and the other former communist countries where free speech meant a quick trip to the gulag.
about 4 months ago
Freedom of expression in Russia? I wouldn’t really call it that. I would see the current situation in Russia as being temporary and the result of lack of enforcement due to lack of resources, corruption, and outright greed (capitalism in action I guess.) Russia is starting to get its internet “enforcement” in place (under pressure from the West, I think) and, when first set up, the “Friendly RUNET Association” website listed homosexuality alongside bestiality as one of the problems on the internet that needed to be addressed. I don’t think the underlying Russian attitude towards freedom of expression has changed.
about 4 months ago
Josh, who are these ‘Christian Fundamentalists’ you bang on about? You seem to use them as the regressive, faceless terror. Much like the ‘Christian Fundamentalists’ use Islamists! You share more in common with your fundamentalist friends than you originally thought.
about 4 months ago
Barky, josh is free to answer for himself, but my guess is he used “Christian Fundamentalist” as a shorthand for the “usual suspects.” Although in the US, many would be surprised to find how much of the litigation and harassment of the ephebo culture comes from oldtime hardline feminists. In the late 1970s, the feminist party line was that “all sex was rape” and that “all nude photography was sexual exploitation.” No one took that stuff seriously. However, feminists changed their focus on these planks from a “woman issue” to a “children’s issue”–and now it is a great success. In addition, you hear a lot of gaybots now saying “intergenerational” relationships are “not about sex, they’re about power”–feministspeak once again. Janet Reno and other horrors of humanity mainstreamed themselves as “child advocates” and hid behind bogus “child defense” reasons for their mishandlings in the Massacre at Waco, Texas and the machine-gun-in-the-face bit with Elian Gonzalez. And let’s not forget the politicians who have passed Patriot Act style stealth policies under the radar as various “Meagan’s Laws” and “Amber Alerts” and the like. Did you know Homeland Security maintains detailed sex deviants’ files, including millions of “porn” pictures? Is Homeland Security telling us they think perverts are going to mass attack?
about 4 months ago
I have a point in favor with Nibblebit. They received a complaint about Blogspot: boybeauty
They received the complaint and reviewed the page. Saw nothing wrong and that was that.
The blog owner wrote of the experience here:
http://photoboy-boybeauty.blogspot.com/2009/11/false-complaint-about-this-blog.html#comments
about 4 months ago
There is nothing wrong with Nibblebit if you are posting legal content as far as I know. In case you were wondering I haven’t seen a blog deleted from Tumblr in many many months and I have seen some with obvious illegal content that still exist. I think they generally gave up on trying to control the type of blogs being created (it’s turned into a social network more than a blog now anyway), but it’s not a place for child porn and I don’t want it to be.
about 4 months ago
Nibblebit doesn’t allow any pictures of teenagers in NSFW blogs anymore (even if the teenagers are fully clothed. You can post them when you flag your blog as SFW but then you can’t even post shirtless ones or ones in “sexy poses”, they are pretty strict about that now, someone with a blog there got a mail about this from them and posted it on his blog but I forgot which one it was :/
And one or two tumblelogs I had in my Reader where deleted recently (as within the last month).
about 3 months ago
Wow that sucks, Hate to see any good boy blogs go.