If you’re here, you probably already know that recently I made the decision to shut down my main site, nnia.space. The shutdown will happen on November 10, the last backups will be taken and stored by our mods, and the site will become indefinitely unavailable, going into a hibernation of a sort.

This is a very drastic decision on my part, and I want to talk about what led to it.

Somewhere around March of this year I was invited in a large group chat that included most current map fedi admins. The purpose of the chat was addressing the growing problem of CSEM. I already knew of one CSEM instance, managed by the former Newgon instance co admin, but in that chat I found out of two more (one also served as a gateway to an onion site with torture content). I and a few more people tried to organize mass defederations of these instances and the people who ran them. If you don’t spend a lot of time on fediverse and don’t know this term, to defederate something means to make it so users from that site can no longer see or interact with yours, and vice versa. Basically, we wanted to cut these instances off from the rest of map fedi.

For a while it seemed like our point of view was prevailing, and these instances did get defederated by a large number of the admins. But the more problems surfaced, the more apathetic the response was. There was a person I wanted to add to the mass defederation list – someone who was attempting to set up a grooming cult. I do not use the word “cult” lightly, this individual was targeting predominantly teenage girls with BPD, pushing them to give out sensitive info to use for doxxing (this person actually admitted to it), and to identify themselves publicly as “dolls of [name]”. I wanted to seal them off from map fedi to prevent them from getting more victims, but most other admins did not find them that troubling.

While being in that chat, I also gained access to more events on fedi in the form of gossip, and found out about several teenagers that spoke up about being sexually abused. Some of them named long term fedi members or instance mods as their abusers. With input and advice from one person, I made a small group chat for them to connect and talk about what happened. One person I never had in that chat, but tried to invite, was someone who was doxxed and had their nudes leaked by the admin of one of the CSEM instances. But even without that person, we had some important discussions in that space. Someone told me that, on fedi, nobody listens.

A few months later it turned out that my original co founder of that chat and one of their friends were abusing someone themselves. I removed them, but the project already died by itself.

In summer one of my friends reached out to me after they accidentally ended up in a telegram group chat where people shared videos of torture of dogs. They noticed a fedi instance mod in the member list and wanted me to see if I can do something. In the screenshot they gave me, I also recognized another person, a different mod who actually supported me during the defederation debates and who I was on friendly terms with.

I messaged them both. The first one denied having known what the group was for, and I did not believe them, but there’s nothing I could prove. The second had a long argument with me about the ethics of animal torture content. By the end they agreed to quit that chat, and I decided to give them a chance.

Around the same time I found out that the CSEM instance owner that doxxed a teen now co runs a new instance. They were also allowed to register on another as a user. I did not succeed in persuading anyone that it was a problem. It seems like, by the middle of summer, other fedi admins started seeing the debate around CSEM and abuse as yet one more annoying discourse topic. Later I was even invited by one of them in an art related chat where that same CSEM admin was.

In August someone else told me that the person who promised me to quit the animal torture chat was spotted sharing more animal torture content elsewhere. This time it was in an element group chat for map fedi people. The one who originally spoke up about it was a teenager who felt traumatized by it. I messaged my acquaintance again, and we quarreled again. This time I did not forgive them.

To finish it up, around the same date someone else has told me that one of the currently respected popular fedi personalities was a part of a group that emotionally abused one of my friends last year. I was given screenshots that tied that person to someone else I already knew as my friend’s abuser and proved they were all together when the abuse was happening.

By late August I decided to have myself a small hiatus and just think. I had too much at once and already felt like I was losing. The main thing I was trying to establish for myself was how deep it all goes. Could I still cut it off? Nnia was about 3 instance hops removed from people who doxxed teenagers and sent them torture porn. And people completely innocently were making these instance hops, just because they wanted friends, other perspectives, or had idle curiosity.

I was pulled out of my hiatus by drama regarding someone who said they would report groomers to police. Some of the things that person posted were indeed dubious, but the outrage and fear they caused were completely out of proportion in comparison to anything that’s been said this year about abuse.

I went inactive again for about a month, after that I tried to disconnect nnia from the rest of the pedi altogether by defederating almost everything, but very quickly realized it doesn’t prevent people from choosing instances managed by abusers or permissive towards abusers, and that this process won’t stop for as long as these instances exist.

Probably there were other solutions in my position, just sitting and waiting while the critical mass of users will leave nnia and trying to build something anew with the ones that stay could have worked. But I spent this whole year in a loop of telling people “you should care about abuse” and hearing back “why won’t you just shut up about discourse and be nice”. I realize now I just no longer believe these people, I no longer believe in these people, and I don’t think anything good will come out of staying in their proximity and introducing others to them. They made having a fun time their primary goal and push back against everything that’s annoying. I think this is how abuse begins. This is not what I ever wanted for nnia.

So here we are, about a month before nnia’s shutdown. After that I will no longer use fedi. I will stick to nnia.cc, which does not federate with anything by default, and I will try to get more active in para sectors of normie social media. But I will keep in touch with the few fedi people I still trust, and I will wait. All data of nnia will be safely stored away, and we will be able to relaunch it if we see a change.