Futureporn August 2023 Update

A quick update on the past 30 days of Futureporn development, and a look at what's coming next. I got sick and had to spend almost two weeks in bed recovering, followed by a refreshing four day vacation for my brother's wedding. No tangible website updates this month, but there's plenty in the works for a major update next month.

What I've been working on

I am a big fan of reducing complexity. This past month, I've taken the first step at simplifying the website from a bespoke, fragmented clusterfuck of design frameworks and build systems. I've selected next.js as the new website framework. This is a React.js based framework with a large community which I can tap into in times of need. Previously, I was on my own in this regard, struggling to get help from small, inactive software communities when things unexpectly broke. I'm really excited to work with React, as it's featureset lends well to interactive frontends with the live, up-to-date data.

As requested on the Futureporn Discord server, patrons have asked for an improved Tags page. I went ahead and implemented this by adding a tag sorting function, and a filter input box. I also added a number next to each tag name which shows the count of vods containing that tag. Tags can be sorted either alphabetically or by frequency (count). These changes will be released in the next update.

I'm working towards feature parity between the current site and the new redesign. This involves copying over old code, and adapting it to run using React paradigm. It's a lengthy process that takes a lot of mental focus, but I'm pleased to do it. The big push for this redesign was that the current site is not easily adaptable to feature more than one vtuber. One month in and I'm almost halfway there (7/19 tasks), which leads me to believe that September will be the month the redesign launches.

Recent Challenges

Github shadowbanned the Futureporn organization I recently created. This org was meant to help me store and structure my code, as well as track issues, goals, and milestones. Until this event, I had been flying under the radar using Github successfully for Futureporn. I think I might have caught the attention of Github's censors. Going forward I'll be self-hosting my code repositories at https://gitea.futureporn.net/futureporn This actually takes away some worry, since I no longer need to be cautions about what I post in readme files or issue trackers. I don't have to worry about being deplatformed and losing my project management tools if I'm running the platform myself.

Ideas

Every other day I seem to come up with a new idea that could take Futureporn to the next level. I want to implement as many good ideas as possible, but I'm very aware that good ideas are the easy part of the equation for creating a great website. The hard part is the execution of those ideas, which is the most time intensive and technically challenging part of building something.

The idea I have is to create a calendar which shows a historical record of past LewdTuber livestreams. Think of Waybackmachine, but specifically tailored to showing you recorded porn livestreams from the past. This serves as a historical document, as well as a visual indicator of Futureporn's progress in archiving every past livestream. The livestream dates could show up in green on the calendar to show that the vod is present, whereas red would show for missing a vod not yet archived.

When I was originally building Futureporn, I didn't have every ProjektMelody livestream saved on disk. Finding a copy of each VOD was an iterative process that took over a year to complete. It wasn't something I completed myself, either. There were countless contributors who reached out, filling in the gaps I had missed.

It's this same collaboration that I'm counting on in the coming months. Futureporn has been a library of 1 vtuber, and maintaining that library has proven a challenge. For futureporn to succeed at becoming a library for all the lewdtubers, we will need the wisdom of the crowd.

I'm preparing an improved upload page which visitors can use to share their copy of archived lewdtuber streams. Together we can fill in the historic calendars for every lewdtuber out there, creating a repository of vods for easy viewing of missed moments.

Archiving all the lewdtubers is a lofty goal, and it's not going to happen overnight. This is a long and arduous process, and there are a lot of improvements that need to happen in order to create a robust website that scales. Automation is going to play an important part in reducing vod import and maintenance tasks, which will increase exponentially after adding more lewdtubers.

Let me introduce futureporn-historian.

futureporn-historian is a small program which crawls through all past tweets of a lewdtuber, creating a filtered dataset of tweets which contain a chaturbate invite link. Tweets with these links are considered start times of Chaturbate streams. These tweet timestamps can then populate a calendar which shows every known chaturbate stream for a given vtuber. Once tied into the backend, the calendar data will be automatically available for rendering by the frontend.

It sounds simple in theory, but change is a universal constant. Twitter has been changing a lot lately, and futureporn-historian's code is no longer able to retrieve tweets. It's something I will need to revisit and revamp once the redesign is complete.

The goals going forward

Let's talk about Futureporn's work-in-progress mission statement.

"The Galaxy's Best VTuber Hentai Site"

Did you know that ProjektMelody is permanently banned from Pornhub? That's right, we live in a world where innovating pornstars are marginalized on the top porn sites. Melody's older videos are still there, but she can't upload anything new, and her ranking on that site is forever doomed to decline. It makes zero sense to to me, it's not fair, and it's one of the problems I aim to solve with Futureporn.

Vtuber hentai stars are welcome here, and together we can grow and conquer not just Earth, but the entire Milky Way Galaxy! IPFS makes this possible, and simultaneously creates an open access R18 library that exists with or without futureporn.net's servers.

You da viewer

As always, thank you very much for funding Futureporn's development. Your generous donations make this work possible, and I will continue to do my best to deliver.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below, or over on Futureporn's discord server. https://discord.gg/wrZQnK3M8z

Thank you!