@Mocaccicci yes, bad actors invade our space as they do all social media platforms. The rules on freedom of expression when it comes to fictional art on baraag is easy to take advantage of, but I will not compromise on principle.
You may find it more agreeable to move to another Mastodon server with stricter rules on problematic content such as aethy.com
@Mocaccicci I do not ban the mere use of words like pedo and pedophilia in the context of fictional art such as the vocabulary used in the dialogue between characters.
There are other problematic words that could be used on baraag with art such as the N-word or nazi phrases/symbology. These things are offensive, but at the end of the day are in the realm of fantasy.
What is banned is the actual reference or solicitation of real life child abuse content.
Each time I try and persevere. I will always fight to keep baraag alive for as long as I can still find a way to do it. Thank you to everyone that continues to support this community despite this setback.
In the nearly 8 years of our existence, baraag has now experienced almost every point of failure conceivable. We have been banned from being funded by popular patronage platforms. We have had a server host provider suspend their service with us. We have had a registrar seize our baraag.net domain name. We have lost our DNS service provider and CDN service provider. Our object storage service provider for media was terminated. And finally, our automated backup system failed.
We were able to restore a fraction of the lost media thanks to the assistance of another Mastodon server admin who kindly provided a partial cache of baraag's data since August 2024. But while we tried to recover what we could, we regret to inform our users that there are still significant gaps in the affected time period that will be missing forever. We suspect that baraag users with very few followers will be the most affected by data loss.
However, I must admit to some terrible news. During the recovery process, we discovered that the worst thing that could happen to an online artist community has happened to baraag: the automated backup system we had for disaster recovery has not been functioning as we expected for some time, and its issues remained un-diagnosed until this past week. Thus, we have permanently lost a significant amount of media uploaded to baraag since August 2024.
On February 19th 2025 at approximately 10:40pm UTC, baraag went offline after an affiliate of the site decided to terminate their media storage services with us.
After 10 long days, baraag is finally back online with new service providers. This would not have been possible without the help of several people (if you’re reading this then you know who you are and forever have my gratitude).
@sun it is almost impossible to establish any direct communication with the admin of misskey.io
I am still frustrated that they ban baraag users for not censoring their art, with some of them even going out of their way to comply to lift the block.
I also want to apologize for the sluggish performance of baraag lately. I am aware that browsing & loading pages have been less than ideal. Ever since the mass exodus from X started, baraag has been under heavy load as people traffic to alternatives like the fediverse or bluesky. I tried adding more resources but its barely able to keep up. I plan to migrate baraag in the next month to a more powerful server to get us back to speed. 7 years we survived. With your support let us survive another 7
I am sad to hear the news of aethy shutting down. Already I am receiving a lot of requests for accounts from aethy users on top of the backlog of applications I still have to get through.
I am also seeing concerns over the future of our own instance here. Please know that if baraag shuts down it is because I have exhausted every possible avenue to keep this community alive. I will not give up for as long as I can legally and financially afford to maintain baraag.
While baraag has remained closed as invite-only, the server is now hitting its limits and I am left with no choice but to make another upgrade soon to keep us running smoothly.
The new server I am eyeing will increase my monthly cost by an additional $300 USD, an amount that I can bear for a short while before it stops being financially sustainable for me.
I hate to make a plea for donations but if you can spare anything to my SubscribeStar or pixivFANBOX pages, I would be forever grateful.