This isn’t an AI-generated post, a data-driven annual report, or an admin announcement.
Today’s piece is the founder’s personal year-end letter—part field note from a queer, sex‑positive, non‑extractive community infrastructure experiment in Taiwan.

Hi. If you’ve been around Lezismore for a while, I might be a familiar name—something you’ve heard in passing. If you’re new (or you found your way here from somewhere else), this may be the first time you’ve heard me speak.

In Lezismore we sometimes call our members “bubbles.” It’s a slightly silly metaphor, but it fits: fragile, floating, stubbornly alive.

I’m Shin, the founder and admin of Lezismore (濡沫). Technically, today I’m “supposed” to do an annual recap, but I’m terrified I’ll botch it and turn into one of those CEO LinkedIn essays everyone wants to mute

Over the past decade, Lezismore has been my experiment in what I call non-extractive queer infrastructure: a community that tries—sometimes clumsily—to run on trust rather than surveillance, and on care rather than data.

This letter isn’t a product pitch or a policy paper. It’s a field note from inside that experiment: the fractures, mistakes, governance trade-offs, and quiet forms of power that rarely make it into conference panels or academic articles.

Imagining myself speaking to the whole community is, honestly, more pressure than most people imagine.

In a one-on-one chat, you can read the other person—who they are, what they need—and find a decent entry point. But speaking to “a crowd with no faces,” especially a crowd this wildly diverse? From people who’ve only just come of age, to people who’ve long since built families, even have kids; older queer folks; and yes, users who show up with malice. Queer life comes in a hundred textures, too—from the local 8+9 crowd (Taiwan slang) who genuinely can’t be bothered with your bullshit, to the “literary lesbian” stereotype everyone loves to sneer at. Different tastes. Different styles. Different self-identifications. Different gender identities and orientations. A tone you think is polite reads as painfully fake to another group; a joke you think is sincerely funny gets you accused of discrimination by a whole other crowd pointing a finger at you.

The bigger a space gets—and the further it stretches beyond one warm little echo chamber—the harder “speaking well” becomes. If your goal is “don’t be annoying,” then what you can say shrinks: flatter, safer, more fragmented. More “official voice.” More “assigned-role” performance.

Most of us move through platforms like travelers. We watch empires rise, we watch them fall—and then we move to the next one. Creating accounts, deleting accounts—sometimes a softer, sometimes a harsher version of being erased. Those experiences shaped our generation.

And still, the world keeps trying to convince us: if you don’t speak (on certain mainstream platforms), if you aren’t seen (by subscribers, likes, notification bells, views), you’re trash, you’re useless. If your content isn’t “engaging” enough—whose fault is that? If you “aren’t seen,” then you might as well not exist.

But in my experience: speaking, not speaking, speaking too much, speaking too little—there’s always a story behind it.
As someone who has spent years unable to “speak publicly” in any comfortable way, I believe the stories you can’t spit out are the ones that deserve to be cherished even more.

Years ago, I got furious at a friend I’d known for a long time. When she asked how I’d been, I mentioned the community’s struggles. She said, “Huh? Running a community site costs money? Aren’t they all free?”

I went quiet—and stayed quietly pissed for years.

She couldn’t even see the obvious part—servers, hosting, a few tools. As if the internet runs on good vibes and free air. And that’s before you get to the costs that actually matter: keeping a sex-positive queer community alive without turning people into data—the governance labor, the safety work, and the legal risk that comes with certain kinds of speech here. The cheapest way to build a platform is to make users legible—and collectible. That isn’t what I built.

In my head, I played out a thousand versions of the doubts I might get (or already had gotten): “Isn’t vibe coding super convenient now? Infra costs aren’t that bad, right? You always say it’s hard—why not list it all out and have the community split it?” …After rehearsing all that, I wanted to speak even less.

If she were just a random passerby, I honestly wouldn’t care. No expectations, no disappointments—none of my business. Because she was a longtime friend whom I thought “should know better,” the gap felt brutal. That gap made me angrier than I wanted to admit. That one sentence felt like it negated everything I’d tried to do, like a sneer that erased the real cliffs and risks I’d climbed. It became a canyon between us.

I never explained to her why I pulled away. Because that was just the last straw.

Was it because I couldn’t explain? No. I spent years “explaining like my life depended on it”—full-force, meticulous, 100% output; misunderstood or criticized and I’d smile and play nice (then explode in private). I thought if I explained clearly enough, documented everything, laid out the process, the context, the analysis, with sharp commentary and citations laced with a bit of sarcasm—if I wrote it to the absolute limit—then surely I’d be understood.

(Ah, youth—still wet behind the ears.)

A tiny handout of understanding from someone else could “have” me. It could also shatter me. I used to be that fragile.

2025 is a year worth marking. For one thing, it’s Lezismore’s tenth anniversary.

If you’ve lived here, you already have your own love-hate saga. If you’re reading from the outside: let me explain why I keep calling this place “statistically impossible.” Not in the poetic “I shouldn’t exist” way. More in the literal, on-paper way—this kind of community isn’t supposed to survive.

At the end of last year, we introduced Drift Bottle: a way to delete your own topic (the original thread), even after a conversation has already formed around it.

This probably sounds like the most basic feature in the world. But it was, for us, a real reversal.

Lezismore was originally designed to do the opposite of “use-and-throw-away.” The point was to build conversations that could outlive the moment—threads that could be returned to, argued with, learned from.

Then the community grew its own life. People made their own collective choice about what this place is for. And the old “no self-delete” rule turned into a very human kind of pain: users asking to erase their own traces, and admins having to do it manually, case by case. It was exhausting for everyone.

So yes—we shipped a self-delete feature. Deliberately not frictionless. Deliberately a little awkward. In product-metrics terms, it helped. In original-design terms, it was a compromise.

What I chose was this: with very limited time and labor, keep this place alive a little longer.

Early 2025, Lezismore presented at RightsCon. If you don’t know what that is: think of it as a global gathering point for people working on digital rights.

Nothing about it was cinematic. I fumbled. I missed beats. I will always spend more time criticizing my own performance than anyone else ever could.

And still—Lezismore walked into that room as a lone wolf. No government org. No NGO sponsorship carrying us. No movement organization boosting us. No professors or officials. No celebrity big shots vouching and introducing us.

It was my first all-English talk. I was terrified.

But the grind paid off. The doors that opened afterward—still opening—keep proving a belief I’ve lived by with my body: No road here? Then I’ll fucking carve one out myself.

Because on paper, Lezismore really shouldn’t exist.

A sex-positive queer community that refuses the usual shortcuts—no real-name gates, no identity checks, no gender verification, no data hoarding as a business model, no surveillance as “safety.” A founder who stayed anonymous by design, for a decade, on purpose—an anti-influencer stance in an attention economy that treats invisibility as failure. A platform that insists some things deserve not to be content.

And yet: ten years. Still here. Still moving. Still full of people living on different timelines.

One of Lezismore’s oldest problems is also one of the most ordinary problems in queer life online: we’re in the same room, but we’re living on different clocks.

“Respect diversity” is a beautiful slogan. It’s also an extremely convenient policy. But when you actually try to live it inside one shared space—with real people, real histories, real injuries—it’s deeply uncomfortable.

So what do I mean by “different timelines”?

One person has already fought her way through years of insistence and struggle—paid in blood to understand why she’s a sexual minority, and what that costs. She’s tired of labels, tired of stereotypes, tired of the weird (often unspoken) rules inside queer communities themselves. Life is already heavy. Why spend more energy stepping into debates, explaining basic vocabulary, reenacting the same arguments? Block. Mute. Log out. Delete account. Peace at last.

But in the same space, there are also newcomers—fresh out of the gate. They’re still trying to find a mirror that doesn’t flinch. They have every right to question the past, challenge it, even resist it. Sometimes they’ll even turn around and use stereotypes to defend what they already know, because it’s the only armor they’ve got.

They ask questions naturally—sometimes the same ancient, never-dying FAQ that comes back like a monthly cycle. They don’t search. They don’t read history (to be fair, it can be hard to find). They just drop the question into the room, drop an opinion into the thread—often with that faint, accidental arrogance of: I’m willing to talk, so you should be grateful.

Now add age, orientation, class, language, taste, trauma, desire—slice it thinner and thinner, magnify it—and it becomes endless parallel universes.

No one is “right,” and no one is “wrong.” But the feeling of being betrayed, mistreated, mocked is real.
The loneliness—and the not-being-understood—is real.

And this isn’t a “lesbian problem.” It’s a governance problem: what happens in any long-lived, high-churn online space where some people arrive with scars, and others arrive with questions.

I keep reminding myself of this—not as a moral lesson I hand down from a mountaintop, but because I’m inside it too. I’m not watching “different timelines” from afar. I’m one of the people living on one.

And sometimes it hurts.

Some bubbles say Lezismore is getting more and more boring—that only hookups are left. Some say the “good girls” all got scared away. Some pin their frustration on a specific gender, person, event. Some narrate their “insider observations” in rich detail, veteran-driver guiding the route.

True or false, right or wrong—three people can conjure a tiger out of rumor. Say something enough times, and to some extent, it becomes “true,” because it changes what people expect to find.

About the “only hookups” thing: in English, hookup can sound casual, even boring. In my Taiwan ten or fifteen years ago, it was a word you didn’t say out loud unless you were ready to be called disgusting—especially if you were a woman. We fought for the right to name desire by ourselves. Approval or “being liked” was NEVER the point.

Then the attention economy arrived. Sex became profitable content. “Spicy” takes became clicks. And suddenly, younger people who grew up surrounded by algorithmic thirst-traps can get tired of anything that smells like sexual discourse—because it feels like clout-chasing, even when it isn’t.

Lezismore was sex-positive long before this content was profitable, and anti-influencer by design. We didn’t build this place to farm attention.

And frankly: it is not true that the only thing left here is hookups.

No one has read this place for ten years, post by post, the way I have. In the threads I see every day, people look for roommates, write long quiet diaries, trade survival notes, ask for a meal buddy, a travel companion, a friend to sit with in a bad week. Sometimes desire is part of that. Sometimes it’s explicitly the point. Most of the time it’s messier—and more human—than the flat label “hookup.”

So what is the admin supposed to do when these timelines collide?

Join the debate battlefield? Pull out backend data and slap people in the face with it? Screenshot DMs and publicly shame “trash girls” and “gross men”? Come forward with personal testimony?
(Or maybe we’ve done all of it before—and then ran into real problems and had to adjust; or maybe it’s just not possible, or not appropriate, to keep doing that forever?)

Calling people out feels good. Debunking feels good. Public shaming and humiliation—honestly, the effect on “community cohesion” is almost too good.

On mainstream platforms, the call for (cis)women-only queer spaces shows up with clockwork regularity: one post, instant thousands—ten-thousands—of likes.
It sounds simple: keep all the “dirty things” outside, charge membership fees, problem solved.

If it were that simple, then why are there so many people worldwide doing space-making, gender organizing, community governance—what the hell are they doing? Did no one think of this “one simple easy trick”?

So many seem to be doing it already—why does the same post keep coming back every week? If the solution is so obvious, why does it keep failing to stay solved?
Is it marketing? Is it reach? Is it product design? Did the UI accidentally use the wrong slang? Should we go pitch a startup and raise an angel round? Did the founder get exposed in some scandal? What’s the actual problem?

Here’s the part that’s hard to say out loud: gated purity can work, but only for a while. But the structural incentives that produced the harm in the first place don’t disappear. They just get re-skinned.

Building a common enemy is the easiest glue.
The humiliation and bullying of women / gender-diverse people is a bloody, brutally uncomfortable reality, and it’s very easy to summon emotion with it. The work of building women-only spaces is real, and some of those spaces have saved lives.

My critique is not “women-only spaces are bad.” My critique is the illusion that verification and exclusion alone can solve systemic harms.

So what is “your own power,” really?
Is it buying merch to support? Is it influencers screaming at trash men and trash women on your behalf? Is it a platform handing you one-click identity selection (with data collection and review attached)? The less users have to think, the better; product design should be convenient, easy, frictionless, low cognitive load.

How do we “rely only on ourselves”—decide when to stay, when to go, how to swim—so that in an era of nonstop noise, there’s still room for one more possibility: dignity even when you’re not seen?

That process is something each person has to walk through for themselves. Nobody can walk someone else’s life.

I’m not anyone’s spokesperson—and I absolutely hate the bullshit setting of “someone = the representative Taiwanese lesbian.” “Representation” is a flattening machine. It compresses complexity until speech becomes thin (but great for personal branding and easy community identity).

So cultivating a place where people can grow their own power—rather than manufacturing one more beloved, validated idol—that’s what I believe is worth time and energy.

I’m in another timeline right now—mostly invisible, by design—carrying what I can carry.

Different timelines are lonely. And the demands, projections, and doubts thrown at you from other timelines can be genuinely painful.

I’m saying this because I’m not standing on a mountain, calmly describing everyone else’s clocks. I’m in the room too. I’m just not always the loudest person in it.

Every day, I have to resist the temptation to respond with an easier script:
“These people are idiots.”
“Can’t you read? The announcements are right there.”
“Why are there so many rude messages / vile users?”

If I wanted to play the influencer game, Lezismore would never run out of “material.” And it would sell the shit out of people’s stories. Ten years of confessions, longing, drama, tenderness, horny chaos—packaged into weekly content, interviews, reaction clips, bite-sized moral lessons. There are a hundred ways I could turn other people’s lives into my personal brand.

But admin ethics and influencer marketing are not the same job.

A sex-positive queer space survives because some things stay low-profile. Privacy isn’t just a feature; it’s a strategy. In a world that treats visibility as currency, choosing not to be seen is sometimes the only way a fragile ecosystem can keep breathing.

Not treating Lezismore as “content material” in the attention economy hurts. Because the algorithmic world teaches one lesson on repeat: if you don’t speak up, don’t package a catchy story, don’t build a personal brand, you might as well not exist.

And in an AI-indexed world, anything that is not turned into “content” risks statistical erasure.
Lezismore is, stubbornly, a place that insists some things deserve not to be content.

When you choose not to speak in the mainstream way, people’s expectations of “the admin” flip into disappointment (sometimes resentment), or (more often) indifference.

Countless times, this site has been a nightmare for me. Even seeing the interface can trigger trauma—and I know I’m not the only one who feels that way. Other bubbles, too, in timelines I never witnessed, have loved and been hurt in Lezismore, and the interface itself can bring that injury back.

People can log out, delete accounts, swear love-oaths to a partner, offer “never using Lezismore again” as a sacrifice of loyalty.
Or some posts are so weird, so cringe you could dig a three-bedroom apartment with your toes.
People come when they’re happy to pet the place a couple times, and when they’re unhappy, they stomp a few times and leave.

But I can’t.

For a long time, I believed—most absurdly—that I was the loneliest person in this community.
Not because no one loved me. Not because I deserved pity.
Because I was the one person who couldn’t simply leave.

And because the idea of “the founder” gets used—by people who know just enough to borrow it, weaponize it, or trade on it—as a kind of currency.

Here’s one small story.

Once, I went on a date as a nobody in Lezismore community. Just a person. Not “the admin.” Not “Shin.” Anonymous on purpose—the way I’ve lived for years.

The other person sat down and, in their very first breath, announced: “I know the founder of Lezismore.”
They told a whole elaborate story about it, like a credential. Like proof they were trustworthy.

I just sat there, quietly stunned.
Because I was the founder.
And I had never seen this person in my life.

If I wanted to be petty, I could have turned that moment into content. A perfect little story for the internet: ironic, humiliating, instant likes.

I didn’t.

Not because I’m noble. Because even in that ridiculous moment, I could feel something else in them—loneliness, desperation, that frantic need to borrow warmth by borrowing proximity to power.
So I swallowed the joke.

But it taught me something I already knew: my name gets misused.
Sometimes to inflate social capital. Sometimes to lure trust from other bubbles. Sometimes as a shield. Sometimes as a weapon.
And I can’t control it.

I’ve also had real, non-consensual privacy leaks. Real stalking and harassment. The law could not help me at all.
And yes—over the years, a small part of this community has not only thrown insults from the sidelines, but become complicit in harm.

So I learned to disappear as much as possible.
Disappear until I’m just background, unnoticed, day after day.

This year, my biggest gain is that this endless-looking torment seems to have a bit of meaning.
Who would imagine, in a world with no guarantees, that ten years of “background” could become the foreground of another dimension?

On a timeline most people don’t know exists, I carried ten years of practice into rooms that speak a different language—different fields, different expertise, different stakes. I listened to people describe an urgent need for privacy that isn’t just “data protection,” but the protection of the fragile space where intimacy and desire and selfhood take shape before they become data..

Sitting there, I realized: I know exactly what that is.
It’s what I’ve been doing for ten years.

And the echo of that collision told me: yes. I’m sure this space is worth protecting.

Lezismore made the news this year—though in a way that was, honestly, kind of funny.

What’s stranger is how late I found out.

We’ve never done marketing. We don’t have the budget, and we never had the desire. The whole strategy—if you can call it that—has always been: stay low-profile, stay survivable.

So I assumed we’d faded into the background by now.

And yet, even this year, in scattered corners of the internet, Lezismore still gets brought up—casually, almost reflexively—as if it never stopped being part of the lesbian rumor ecosystem.

Even when the mention isn’t exactly affectionate.

(I don’t want to feed the clicks, so I’m copying the key excerpt. The link is there—verify it yourself if you want.)

Same-Sex Marriage Goes Sour! Online Hookups and Nude Photos—Angry Divorce, Spouse Sued for Damages | China Times | 2025/10/15

In a same-sex marriage dispute heard by the New Taipei District Court, Xiaohua alleged that her spouse Xiaomei, during their marriage, engaged in flirtatious conversations with others on the social app “Lezismore,” sent nude photos, and wrote on Instagram that she wanted to “find a younger girl and book a room to decompress.” Although no sexual intercourse occurred, the court held that the content of the conversations exceeded what society generally finds acceptable, infringed spousal rights, and ordered damages of NT$150,000. Notably, Xiaohua’s evidence consisted of chat screenshots obtained by logging into Xiaomei’s account; the court found that the couple had previously shared a computer and that Xiaohua reasonably knew the credentials, so the method of proof was not excessive and the content had evidentiary value.

When I saw this, that old muscle memory—“what the hell is this garbage article, I’m going to mark every discriminatory point and drag it until it feels good”—was still vividly intact.

Media / judges see Lezismore as: a dating app, lesbian hookups, a place where things happen that are “clearly beyond what society’s general notions can tolerate.”

Pff—HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

But—if even lesbians themselves say things like, “Not here. If you’re going to hook up, take it to Lezismore,” or “Lezismore? I heard that’s where you go when you want hookups. I’m not going,” then how can we blame outsiders for reading this place the same way?

For a long time, I tried earnestly to give the Lezismore main site an advocacy tone—trying to “shift” and “loosen” certain stereotypes and assumptions. But first, you can’t control what people think. Second, the structural forces behind those views aren’t something an individual can change unilaterally. And honestly, if we want to debate “reason,” I already did that in other places long ago. But when it’s “not catchy enough,” not short-form video, not endlessly pushed by Stories, not packaged with an entertaining script—no matter how hard you try, you get washed into “nonexistence.”

A few years ago, I overheard a conversation between a group of Taiwanese lesbians and gay men.

It started the familiar way: lesbians marveling at how “abundant” gay men’s sexual ecosystem seems, then spiraling into the old refrain—lesbians have nothing, we’re miserable, patriarchy, etc. And then, inevitably, someone brought up Lezismore.

“Huh? Lezismore?” a lesbian said, without missing a beat. “That’s for hookups.”

“For real? I thought it was an advocacy site,” a gay man said, genuinely stunned. “That’s wild—wait, you can hook up there too?”

And just like that, the conversation snapped into place: Lezismore gossip, complaints, weird encounters, half-laughing horror stories—everybody suddenly had something to say.

It ended with the gay man’s offhand verdict: “Compared to the gay men’s meat market, this feels like a fine-dining restaurant. I can’t do it.” And then they moved on.

(…)

When I used to hear conversations like this, the pain came in layers.

Because there’s a contradiction baked into it.
On one hand: “We have no sexual resources.”
On the other: dismissing an existing space—one built with risk, constraint, and care—as if it’s just “that dirty place for hookups.”

And yes, I could have done what I used to do: go full essay mode. Explain the split design between the main site and the community. Explain why we chose words over photo-grids, why we chose friction over speed, why we refused identity checks, why we refused to turn people into data. I’ve said versions of it before—visible or hidden, direct or indirect—trying to preach to “the community,” trying to show evidence that the design wasn’t random.

But I’m not going to dissect that pain and lay it out for inspection here.
The harder you chase “being understood,” the tighter you lock yourself inside other people’s gaze.

We were always living on completely different timelines. What others experience as real—hard to use, unfair, painful, surprising, chaotic, disappointing, hopeful—belongs wholly to them.

So I started digging deeper. What do I actually want?

Do I want the whole community to understand my intentions?
Do I want people to step in and say one fair sentence when someone starts talking bullshit again?
Do I want them to understand my experience, my grievances, my choices?
Or do I just want someone to pat my head and say: wow, admin, that was hard?

(Who do you think you are? Are you that important? Do you really understand everyone here?)
(No matter how noble your reasons sound, the fact is: you didn’t keep yourself visible. Why should anyone spend extra energy caring?)
(Haven’t you learned enough by now? You still want to open your heart like that?)
(Pats don’t pay invoices. Who’s paying the bills tomorrow? Who’s fixing infra? Who’s answering police letters? Who’s carrying legal risk? Who’s living your life? No one held a knife to your throat. You chose this. If you can carry it, carry it; if you can’t, let go. You can walk away too.)

If I keep saying I respect diversity, and respecting diversity means discomfort—can I also respect that bubbles in this community will bloom in their own ways, making ten thousand choices completely different from mine?

The deeper I look, the more obvious it becomes: the answer was never on other people’s side.

Slowly, I understood that compared to “how other people see Lezismore”—and being furious about it (which, yes, was my default state for years)—what matters more is this:
In Lezismore as an ecospace, how do I grow my own eyes?

And when I say this, I’m not pointing a finger. I’m not saying “whatever happens is your fault because you chose it.”
I mean something simpler—and harder: there is always a choice hidden inside how we look, how we stay, how we leave, how we treat a place, how we treat ourselves.
I chose to carry this. But what I can carry is still finite.
There are consequences I cannot absorb for anyone, not even if I burn myself to the ground trying.

Everything has a choice in it—for you, for me.

If you come here only for hookups or to find a girlfriend (which is fine), if you only read dating posts and skip the rest, if you decide it’s too hard, too annoying, too restrictive—if you decide everyone else here is “beneath you,” and then you leave a few stomps on the floor on your way out—those are real feelings, real experiences.
But they’re also a kind of vision you’ve chosen: the eyes you’ve grown, the frame you’ve decided to look through.

And with time—if we want—we can choose to see more than that.
Some people, before we even talk about what they’ve explored beyond “hooking up,” can turn hooking up itself into decision trees and mind maps—subtle mutual teasing, careful boundary-setting, even hand-drawn erotic art. They widen their horizons, explore gender identity and other possibilities, and even in heartbreak and despair, find a way to believe they might feel warmth again.

You’re the only person who can decide for yourself what kind of eyes you grow—how you look at yourself, how you look at the world.

As for Lezismore—it’s here, staying.

Some people find a steady hook-up, a girlfriend, get married, even have kids.
Some people divorce. Some cheat. Some stay for years and remain lonely. Some never return.
Some sincerely hope they never need to come back—but hey: I left, and then I came back in again.
Some people are just… so weird. One more look. …Well, since I’m here anyway.
Some people use this place as a tree hollow, quietly writing; views and clicks aren’t what they care about most.

I’m also watching how I grow—how I make mistakes, fall down, and get back up.
I’m watching my deep obsession with Lezismore: my anger, disappointment, pain, knots—along with the full, truly mine, never-performed-for-anyone, never-like-baited, wildly vivid encounters that belong to me.

Yes, there are many people and things here that make me uncomfortable. But by observing how I see, how I keep distance or coexist, who I become—over these ten years—no matter how much I’ve lost, I have not come away empty-handed.

Every day. Every day, I keep thinking about how each of you grows into your own shape.

(…)

Years ago, I went to the North Coast in Taiwan. An endless shoreline; waves breaking. A friend and I sat on a gravel path, only a few dozen meters from the water. I joked to my friend: hey, if you want to die, you can just keep walking straight in. If the waves are big enough, one wave will take you—super convenient, no one controls it, no one monitors you. Feels amazing, hahaha.

In that moment, it genuinely felt “easy.”

The strange thing is: precisely because “over there, even wanting to die is allowed,” in an era where every user flow is engineered to keep you measurable—and keep you staying, and every label exists for quantification, I felt a kind of freedom I’d never felt before. Because I could decide every detail for myself—even choose not to decide yet. “I” could exist fully in that moment.

It felt like a luxury. I could decide how to lift my foot, which direction to walk. Decide to close my eyes, open them, and choose what to look at. Feel the humidity of the sea wind on my skin. Loneliness was fine. Even if I walked all the way into the ocean—if I picked the timing right—no person and no system would appear to hint or command or correct or guide or comfort or judge me, saying: it’s just this and that, why not try this or that, you could actually do these and those.

I had once nearly died, and I know the stages of drowning, the exact sensations. I knew I truly could decide whether to live, and how to exist. And because of that, I felt—strangely—free.

(Of course, I made a different choice. That’s why I’m here now.)

Lezismore isn’t a place where you have to be loved. It’s not a goal-oriented “service” that delivers dating outcomes. It never was.
Lezismore is where you practice this: even if (even inside the community) nobody loves you, you’re not seen, you’re not validated—you can still live with dignity, as yourself.

And precisely because of that, you reclaim the possibility of “I can be loved, too.”
But it’s no longer a prerequisite you must prove to exist—it becomes your (my) sovereignty to decide.

Many bubbles (sometimes including me) accidentally think Lezismore is “small.”
Not small in numbers—though we’ve never had the kind of follower-count ecosystem that mainstream platforms treat as oxygen—but small in confidence.
Because we don’t speak in the standard currency: dashboards, endorsements, and loud visibility.

From the start, we designed “low-profile” as one of our protective colors. A kind of camouflage.
But in an attention economy, it still hurts when it hurts. And after it hurts, you still grit your teeth and keep walking.

In 2025, on another timeline, I sat in rooms where people who genuinely move the world were speaking—through the language of policy, research, and systems; about the next urgent challenges and possibilities in the AI era.
I won’t name names or details here. Not because I’m trying to sound important, and definitely not because I want to borrow anyone’s halo.
It’s simply not the point.

What struck me instead was this: some of what people are only beginning to imagine: what they long for but can’t yet quite describe, has already been a lived fact inside Lezismore for ten years.
And that fact has many causes. Every bubble is one of them.

You don’t owe Lezismore anything.
You can leave any time. You can hate it here. You can never come back.
This ecospace was never meant to bind anyone.

When the springs dry up, the fish gather on land and keep each other wet with spit.
Better to forget each other in the rivers and lakes.
—Zhuangzi

That line is where 濡沫(prounce “Rumo”, the Chinese name of “Lezismore”) comes from.
In drought, the fish do what they can—messy, desperate, almost futile, and still: they don’t abandon each other.
But “moistening each other with foam/spit” is never meant to be the destination.
The destination is the rivers and lakes—the wider water—where each of us can swim in our own sovereignty, without needing to be saved by constant contact.

Most social media platforms are built on the opposite logic.
Their business model is to maximize immersion time and stickiness—to keep you looping inside a trap that never ends, where attention is extracted until it runs thin.

Some professions, by contrast: teachers, doctors, are bound by ethics.
Their work is meant to make themselves less necessary over time: so people can grow, become independent, and live well without them.

Lezismore is closer to that ethic.

Even our English name carries the choice we made long ago: a twist on “less is more.”
Lez is more meaning: queer women, sapphics, gender-diverse people—are not a neat category to be minimized.
We can become more than what the world defines. Desire can have more names. Life can have more routes.
More ways to exist than you were told were allowed.

If you’ve ever posted here, replied, raised a flag, or even just quietly lurked for a while—then the fact that this statistically-impossible Lezismore has lasted over ten years (carrying our wounds) really does include a thread of cause-and-effect that belongs to you.

Whether you’re still here or not, I hope that thread has a chance to become a small talisman you can carry in your own life.

Maybe one day, you’ll suddenly remember:

Someone has always been here, loving (you) in a way completely different from everyone else.