federifederi, views, and farming on neocities?

[rinni]

omg okay so basically um
a while ago, districts, the most well known neocities site index shut down. it had been inactive for a looong time, but they suddenly updated their site with this> https://districts.neocities.org/ . the One Rat

so there was a gap in the market for sites that would  categorize other sites and help boost their visibility!, even though i know of a one other that seems quite popular, districts was the most well known, given the fact they were one of the most followed sites in all of neocities, like 4th?

anyway, that seems to be the inciting incident for the federifederi "situation"
that site started kind of mass commenting on smaller sites, mine included! seeminly farming engagement and trying to recruit as many people as possible. im not entirely sure how it worked, but i do think that you had to follow them in order to be added to the roster

rinni 🩵💻 — Today at 6:01 PM

a lot of ppl, myself included, were QUITE confused at the whole mass commenting thing tbh because neocities doesnt function like normal social media. there's zero advantage to something like that. you dont make money, and followers and views are just as inconsequential! the numbers, i mean.

it really seems like, from the language federifederi used, their goal was to farm views for these smaller sites specifically. and it also seems like whoever established it is quite out of touch w how the social aspects of neocities work
i don't know every detail abt the people ofc, but based on their wording, well, ykno.

people were suspicious, but when federifederi unfollowed everyone all of a sudden, shit hit the fan!! because now the ppl that had bought in, and the ppl that were originaly suspicious were both mad!

The above segment is a rundown of a slight situation that was going on on my neocities dashboard over the weekend. A sitch i find quite interesting, bcause i feel like it says a lot abt the social state of neocities currently, and the people that misunderstand it. I'd really love to discuss the f+f thing with anyone whos familiar with it, because i'm sure that there must be people on the forum who were messaged by them and took a look, and maybe there's even someone who followed f+f to be a part of their directory!
One of my mutuals is livid about the situation, and i can understand being upset about it, but the whole thing is inconsequential at the end of the day, isn't it? No one was harmed, really, and for most, it was just a momentary inconvenience and confusion...


On a more general sense, what do you all think of 'schemes' like f+f whos main purpose is inflating view numbers? Is this too much of a social media mindset, should a perspective like this be fully excluded from the old web movement, or is it ultimately harmless? Should we try the One Rat in a court of law for treason? Please, tell me your thoughts!

Forgive the less than perfectly redacted post, i'm having a bit of a stressful time with school and dont have the brainpower to redact a whole essay lol, but i wanted to open up this conversation!

[wygolvillage]

Wow! That's really strange and it also totally passed me by. I had no idea that this view farming self-promo stuff was happening at all :P

I think the best way to discourage this kind of thing is to let it die off on its own by not engaging, eventually people will realize that it's not really how people interact on here and not find it worth continuing.

[larvapuppy]

I didn't witness this particular incident, but I do see a lot of what I'll call "Attention Seeking Behaviour" on my neocities feed. Things like new users commenting on very popular users' profiles with pointless/spammy messages, or even begging for follows/views. It does give me a bit of second-hand embarrassment. But maybe they don't know that everyone following can see it, or maybe they're incredibly brave. It doesn't really bother me that much, just something funny that I've noticed recently.

[oerrorpage]

my site is part of the f+f community, i almost left them, the reason a lot of people are throwing a fit is because of two words, "top 8", not a lot of people liked that, but now they deleted all their feed for the whole week, some sites that made the project possible left, and im working on a districts resurrection, i want to kill that rat, no one threw a fit because of losing one follower.

[BlazingCobaltX]

I received a follow from them a while back, with some stock message about their site's purpose, but by the time I wanted to check them out they had already unfollowed me. I kinda knew from that already that this was a views/engagement farm more than anything. With Neocities' own options for sorting through sites, an aggregator like this feels sort of redundant - which is why I am surprised that it has gotten so much engagement.

In a way this is the consequence of how Neocities' social aspect is structured: You can see enough metrics of other websites for it to inavertedly become a numbers game. Personally, I have disabled my profile on Neocities because I felt myself getting sucked into it against my will. I agree that not engaging with it at all and letting it die is the best way to deal with farmers like f+f. That said, I wish there were more options to obscure your own numbers or disable seeing others' on Neocities.

[wygolvillage]

In a way it's kind of a blessing that Neocities' view count system is kind of busted (I think it counts individual page hits rather than like a single viewing of the site? So the numbers feel weirdly inflated and inaccurate. According to Neocities my site has 146,738 views, but if I check a counter I have for individual visitors, the number is actually 3,355- still pretty impressive considering just how many people 3,000 truly is, but the viewcount from Neocities is exponentially higher and almost certainly inaccurate. So it became easy to ignore the views and numbers beyond sometimes celebrating visitor milestones, like when I had my first 500 visitors I mentioned it in a blog post iirc.

I agree that aggregators feel unnecessary (the "front site" already serves the same purpose, I'll use it to check certain tags or find random sites, pick one and then just surf links from there), and while I think the "give lesser known sites more attention" is a goal with its heart in the right place, I think that viewing the platform in terms of "attention currency" is itself flawed. I think detaching oneself from these frameworks should be the goal (if you're into the "movement" aspects of the online space especially). The amount of people who've clicked through my biggest webshrine project could have been 4, 40 or 400 and I just have no idea! I create something because I want to have it on my site and I'm having fun making it.

The actual way to spread the love to other sites is to make a site worth visiting, and to encourage others to visit sites you love as well. We have a whole "linking culture" after all :D

[Paprika]

At first I was on board with their project, it seemed interesting to have every lesser known page together and make buttons, like Districts that tried to emulate GeoCities Districts but died out without updating. A few weeks later F+F announced they would rework their system and it was more or less vague at the moment. They did the april fools joke and they announced the new system.

From here, for my point of view, they were trying to claim fame with their "we must delete people from our following because there's a secret ratio on neocities and that will now push us to top 8 !!!"

For some people it's fine, for me it isn't. I didn't came on neocities to replicate the toxic attention-seeking behaviors from larger social media websites. It was fun when they didn't cared about reach or potential viewers. I don't care about loosing a follower (they didn't followed me at all) and I asked them to take my button off their site because I sincerely do not like here they are heading with their new decision.

It also made a super big spammy dashboard to follow them so I completely stopped and moved on. However it's not worth the "drama", just a decision that I don't endorse but looking at some of the topics on their profile there's a lot of anger on both sides and making snarky replies like "we'll block anyone liking that comment from someone that doesn't like us" is some of the most childish behavior I've ever witnessed.

For me it's case closed, I kept it civil because I just don't support their position after shifting, politely asked them to remove my button-link and they did so, I'm moving on.

[shevek]

I think it's fine; if your goal is to show as many people as possible a pre-selected, submitted list of sites to boost their visibility, you kinda have to find a way to rise up the ranks or else you're not delivering what you're promising. Unfollowing indeed made them jump from like number 25 to 8, I think? And it seems like to me that both the creators of federi and the people who want to be featured on it are from the same group of people - they both want exposure, views, followers etc. for their sites. Seems like a fair trade then. I find it weird that the people who want to partake in this to boost their sites are mad when the site they wanna use for that is after the same thing.
In general, follow for follow and all that is so old web, it's kinda fitting and there will always be people who care about climbing the ranks, reaching top spots and optimizing some metrics. I am just glad that's not me, and more people should probably think about it this way.

Also, let's be honest. People just love drama on Neocities and love to inflate and discuss it because it's exciting. I've seen some people talk about this as if this is some kinda scam or there were victims or personal hurt caused - it's really not that deep, it's just follower numbers and the fact that not every submitted site has made it onto that page. Let's just all admit it's fun to gossip instead of attaching a deep injustice to it

edit: typo

[Dibs]

Oh wow, I just checked and the site seems to have been deleted or something. Didn't know that happened!
I had no real stake in it -- my button was featured but I harboured no real feelings one way or the other, and I didn't experience any pros or cons. As above, I don't think it's as major as some people think -- it's just numbers. I know for some people, numbers are be-all-end-all, but as long as they don't hurt people that's not really a problem.
Maybe it's the dichotomy of Neocities' culture clashing that made it such a trainwreck. Between the visible follower and view stats enabling number-oriented mindsets carried over from other platforms, and Neocities being the most mainstream and accessible way for people sick of that sort of thing to make an indie website... something like federifederi was always going to be a balancing act.

I do sort of want to see something like districts come back if only for the novelty of having a geographic proxy for your site's location, but if the last attempt didn't work maybe it's not to be. I think that sort of organisation is more in the spirit of the indie web than views-based rankings (however well intentioned and reverse-ordered). But then in a way, webrings are serving a similar purpose...

Anyway, rip federifederi, brightest stars burn fastest or whatever (their pace of growth did strike me as quite incredible in fairness to them, impressive).

[CRiNGE]

When I was originally contacted by F+F, I was just getting started with Neocities. That was the original reason I joined. But now that I've been here for about 5 months, I've started to debate quitting them. The whole following thing seems a bit weird, especially because of how much it clutters your feed (I usually follow people because I want to get site updates). The april fools joke did get a chuckle out of me, however.

I just think the project doesn't do a good job at discovery. I get where they're coming from with the whole sort by views thing, but having no categories just makes it a confusing mess. And they downscale the buttons so they all look blurry! The Neonaut directory does a better job at categorizing everyone while still letting you discover unknown people.

[oerrorpage]

its really downhill from here, my districts resurrection is inactive and then f+f got deleted, now this motivates me to work on my districts resurrection.

[honowo]

I really liked having my site in different webrings because there's only so much you can find on the front page or from clicking "last edited", and going through the different buttons made me feel like it was back in the old days where you had to click around and didn't Google everything. F+F didn't really serve well as a replacement for something like Districts because it wasn't organized like that, and I would have appreciated something like that while still encouraging that exploration.

its really downhill from here, my districts resurrection is inactive and then f+f got deleted, now this motivates me to work on my districts resurrection.

I hope your replacement takes off! I'll sign up. 

[oerrorpage]

I really liked having my site in different webrings because there's only so much you can find on the front page or from clicking "last edited", and going through the different buttons made me feel like it was back in the old days where you had to click around and didn't Google everything. F+F didn't really serve well as a replacement for something like Districts because it wasn't organized like that, and I would have appreciated something like that while still encouraging that exploration.
I hope your replacement takes off! I'll sign up. 

added :)

[PurpleHello98]

I haven't been on-line much besides vegging out on YouTube the past couple weeks because I've had a tonne going on, I had no idea this happened until I logged on the other day and saw this drama on my dashboard. F+F had never contacted me---does that mean my site's not "small" anymore? It's probably cause I haven't been updating it as much recently instead, and I don't know that I really want my site to be "big" anyways---I call my site "little" even on the landing page because I prefer that sort of feeling. Besides, I imagine having any sort of celebrity must be pretty stressful, but especially when it's supposed to be almost an escape or something like the Net is for many people. But I digress.

I personally used to have a views-followers-etc mindset about my site left over from my social media days, but I've found that since I got rid of that mindset, I've been a lot happier with my site and a lot more chillaxed. It doesn't light quite as much of a fire under my butt to work on my site, sure, but I like to nonetheless when I have time. (So unfortunately, not recently, but once again I digress.) I think the numbers game is just an unhealthy way to look at it since it's always about more, more, more and makes the numbers reflect, at least in one's own mind, one's worth as a webmaster, which is so untrue. Some of my favourite sites have been sites with only a couple followers, and what makes a good site is in my opinion pretty subjective anyways---we each have our own taste.

[bugholder's epiphany]

Apparently Feferi was banned, someone reported the site to the owner of Neocities with the whole spiel about them potentially scamming people with the whole farming for views thing. Personally, i never gave the whole thing much thought, the only problem I had with them was the attitude they had on display but at the same time, I figure they were getting agitated from the debates that were blowing up & spending too much time on the internet. Something something, needed to step away for a bit and all that, yknow? Whether or not the banning is justified is a whole 'nother matter that I suppose depends on if you view it as a big deal, a small thing, or what.

I personally haven't given it much thought, mostly because i've been too busy working in my own projects to focus my attention upon the thing. I do feel it was something blown up a bit more than it should've been though atleast.