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Lights Out | What a Ten-Year Community's Circuit Breaker Revealed中英

　　

Governance notes on Lezismore's two weeks with the lights out in mid-June 2026

On June 9, 2026, that day, the Lezismore community suddenly closed, without an announcement or explanation. This is a self-hosted community with thirty to ninety thousand unique visitors a month, with no active presence on Meta or other mainstream social media.

As an anonymous, independently self-hosted, sex-positive community of sexual minorities, this was of course not our first closure or unexpected event. We came into being in 2015 through being "expelled from lesbian circles." This time, however, it was not because we had been banned by mainstream platforms, not because our hosting provider shut us down, not because a major external event forced a pause; but because, for the first time in more than ten years, "the site" had manually brought itself to a stop.

No server failure, no major external event, no technical problem.

The real reason behind this incident, to put it more safely, would be: an overload of the infrastructure's circuit breaker.

After thirteen days of lights out and a pause, the community reopened. During the pause, a pause page replaced the community entrance.

Screenshot of The Entryway on the pause page: a dark sea, eight questions, and a comment box
The first layer of the pause page (The Entryway). Full-page screenshot; click to view the entire page. The page is still online: lezismore-standby.pages.dev.

At first, there were only eight questions on the first page. None of the explanations commonly offered by a "brand" or a "community."

After a few days, the page grew longer, deeper, and more layered. Each layer down brought more new information and new comments.

By the time of writing, this "pause page" had received seven hundred anonymous comments.

The person writing this is the steward (me). I read every one of those seven hundred comments myself, with my own eyes. I also chose the quotations that follow. The selection principle was: every layer is represented, the fiercest and the deepest are both here, and each comment comes with its full text, so readers can judge for themselves whether anything has been taken out of context.

What everyone saw above the comment box on the pause page was: anonymous comments are not guaranteed publication; some may be made public as material for governance. The anonymous comment form did not ask for or collect personal information, and all comments underwent basic manual de-identification before publication. (For example, personal information such as account IDs and geographical locations was de-identified. Comments that said "please do not publish" were not published.)

1. Stop: Infrastructure Becomes Visible When the Breaker Trips

I use "circuit breaker overload" to describe the act of turning out the lights and pausing because it starts from "the site's" perspective.

What the community's bubbles (as members call themselves) experienced was this: they could not enter their usual community. There was only a pause page and eight questions. The main site was still there. The site had given no advance notice. Asking friends brought scattered guesses, but no one knew the real reason. Lezismore does have several mainstream social media accounts (a Facebook page, Instagram, Threads, X, and so on), but they have not been updated for years. Some are entirely empty.

In the first 14 hours after the lights went out, 3 people came to ask through channels outside the site. Bubbles used their usual LINE and Instagram to ask: is the website broken?

A website with thirty to ninety thousand unique visitors a month, down for 14 hours, and only 3 people took the initiative to ask — in an age of traffic-driven economics, that number can easily be read as a hurtful answer: "It can't get popular. Nobody cares."

But for years, Lezismore's everyday practice has been to maintain no active presence on mainstream social media, post no "daily updates," make no effort to "keep reminding people we exist," and avoid promoting a personal brand as much as possible. Under these conditions, "taking the initiative to ask after an outage" involves enormous friction: to ask a single question, you first have to leave the website, find another channel yourself, and then disturb someone whose disposition and circumstances you do not know.

At the same time, Lezismore has spent years making "no rushing, no disturbing" part of the community's culture and makeup. The bubbles' own responses also show what this space has given them. Some later comments bear this out:

I thought it was my own browser glitching, deleted it and reopened it, and found it still wouldn't load; then I figured maybe the site engineers hadn't noticed yet, and since I knew the people maintaining the community were doing it unpaid, I was willing to wait it out quietly; a while later, this page popped up…

The Entryway・June 12 07:45 q1

I found out Lezismore was gone because I came to reply to a DM.
At first I thought it was a bad signal.
But a few days later I realized the site had actually been shut down.

The Entryway・June 10 10:26 q2

I noticed the site was down right away, kept refreshing for several days before realizing it really wasn't opening.

Ebb Tide・June 21 19:11 q3

A few hours later, I checked Cloudflare. On the first day with the lights out, 3,941 unique visitors came to this closed door. That figure includes bot traffic. One day alone tells us little; a comparison becomes meaningful when we set three weeks from before, during, and after the pause side by side:

Three weeks around lights out, two Cloudflare measures
Seven-day periods. Top: unique visitors. Bottom: requests. Includes bot traffic. Click to enlarge.
Visits barely changed: 21,120, 19,754, 19,874. Requests fell from 2 million to 750,000, then returned to 1.88 million. What fell was automated polling and notifications between community software systems.

The number of people who came during the week the site was closed was almost the same as the week before and the week after reopening. What fell was the request count: the automated conversation between the community software and machines. People's routes here did not change because the door was closed. These numbers cannot answer "do they care?" They answer a question about dependence: how many people's daily lives this place is woven into.

From the bubbles' perspective, opening Lezismore usually means staying inside "the community," without ever thinking of "the main site," because it has no direct bearing on most people's need to meet others. Browsing, scrolling, making friends, dating, writing, creating. Ordinary daily life. Even more people say nothing at all and simply lurk and read. Here, there is no culture of chasing likes or exposure, no habit of following personal brands. Just "life."

Other platforms are all fast food joints, every step rushed, like you're in a hurry to get something; Lezismore here is more like a coffee shop — I can sit down and rest, just order a hot coffee, read a book, and I can still get something out of it too, whether that's inspiration from the book, someone else's story overheard in the coffee shop, or an offhand warm remark from the staff handing over my order.

The Entryway・June 13 07:07 q4

I don't know why, but using this platform never felt like pressure — maybe because it's not that commercialized, you can freely show yourself. On other dating apps, swiping left and right gets you filtered fast, so you have to package yourself up, like putting yourself up for sale on a shelf — someone glances at you once and has to decide whether to put you in their cart, it's missing warmth.

The Last・June 19 22:07 q5

no algorithm, no need to curate a persona. … unlike other apps where you have to manage your image and get fed algorithmic content just to keep you scrolling.

The Last・June 14 17:47 q6

Precisely because of this, the community's bubbles have no need to know who will handle flags today, whether the backups ran, what legal problems lie behind a feature, or who must make the final judgment on a seemingly tiny change. This is what "infrastructure" does: when it works properly, its best way of existing is to be so quiet that people forget it exists.

The longer an infrastructure has been kept running for more than ten years, the less it competes for visibility and a say, the more "it will still open tomorrow" begins to feel like a given… until one day, it really does close.

Susan Leigh Star says infrastructure becomes visible only when it breaks down.1

From the site's perspective, the circuit breaker has tripped. Rest is needed. There is not even a trace of energy left to reply. But explaining would mean unnecessary self-disclosure and scrutiny by the community: the community would not register how the work is done, its history, or its cost, only the inconvenience. Explaining itself takes energy and brings risk. The more you explain, the more you hand the crowd the right to judge "whether you are fit for this."

On the other hand, rushing to lay out ten years of hardship all at once, while everyone is paying renewed attention to this infrastructure, would create another predicament: who wants to read a long-winded account? Screenshots, forwarding, and quotations taken out of context are secondary. The hardest part is the whole explanation becoming another kind of emotional debt: as if demanding that a group of people who "just came to use it" and "never agreed to carry any of this" must, at that moment, feel for you, understand, and give the right answer.

But if nothing were said and the site simply reopened later, the whole event would amount to no more than an outage.

What to do? At the time, the earliest pause page had only one line of status and eight questions. Three of them:

Is a place being 'always there' the default — or is it a cost?
The money collected here is embarrassingly little. Do you think that's naive, saintly, unable to earn, or unwilling to earn?
Imagine this: if the person who runs this place had a name, a face, and showed up every day to build rapport with everyone — would you still talk here the way you do now?

First version of the pause page・June 9

No prescribed answer, just a plain comment box. Anonymous comments went to the backend without personal information. At the very beginning, comments were not published on a wall either, so there were no other people liking, arguing, or comparing which way of putting things was more sophisticated or more correct.

"Is a place being 'always there' the default — or is it a cost?"

Of the 50 comments that explicitly answered this question, 70% said "cost," 16% said "default," and a few said "the default for users, a cost for the person maintaining it." The answers were not especially scattered. The difference lay in whose position people were looking from.

Question 2: "Is a place being 'always there' the default — or is it a cost?" — 50 explicit answers
Of 700 comments, 73 mentioned "default" or "cost"; 50 were answering this question.
Answers such as "the default for users, a cost for the person maintaining it" form a separate category. One comment said "I used to think it was the default; only now do I know it's a cost" and was grouped under perspective.

2. Ask: Friction as Design

The pause page has four layers. This structure was not "planned from the beginning." It was decided, developed, and built during the two-week pause, while I observed the community's responses.

You saw a screenshot of the first layer's eight questions earlier. At the bottom was just one comment box. Answers were not guaranteed publication. You could not see what anyone else had left. No audience, no competition for likes, no comments written for onlookers, no immediate risk of being screenshotted.

The community has long known that there are "people" behind the website managing it, so the expectation when leaving a comment was that "some administrator will see this." Anonymous comments also removed the burden of identity or performance. Without immediate publication, writers did not need to perform for an audience. The design aimed to receive words that were less burdened, more truthful, and more direct. How well did it work? As you read the other comments below, you should be able to judge for yourself.

The comment mechanism for the lights-out pause page was designed to collect no IP addresses, install no third-party analytics or fonts, and save no drafts. Submissions went into a private database separate from the community system. After they arrived, the steward read every one with their own eyes, de-identified it, and assessed its content.

Then the page began to grow deeper: a second layer, a third, a fourth.

The second, third, and fourth layers
Two or three screenshots per layer: its content and its comment wall. Click to enlarge.
Layer 2, The Last・Rooms
Layer 2, The Last・Rooms
Layer 2, The Last・Rooms
Layer 2, The Last・Rooms
Layer 2・Comment wall
Layer 2・Comment wall
Layer 3, The Abyss
Layer 3, The Abyss
Layer 3・Comment wall
Layer 3・Comment wall
Layer 4, Ebb Tide
Layer 4, Ebb Tide
Layer 4・Comment wall
Layer 4・Comment wall

The first layer, "The Entryway": one line of status, eight questions, one comment box.

The second layer, "The Last": several rooms with audio, images, and text, briefly describing Lezismore's rules and costs. It went live on June 13.

The third layer, "The Abyss": law, boundaries, and what is carried by the position at the base of the infrastructure. It went live on June 16.

The fourth layer, "Ebb Tide," went live on June 19. It was the first time in more than ten years that I had said this much to the community as the steward, in my own voice.

The layers were separated by "time spent." There were no passwords between them, no registration, invitation code, or acquaintance needed to lead the way. For example: only after you finished reading the second layer's comments and stayed a while would a dark red heart emerge. That was the entrance to the third layer. After completing the third layer and staying another 20 seconds, a dark green sprout appeared. The entrances did not say "deeper" or "next layer." There was only color, a halo, and the rhythm of breathing.

The passage from the first layer to the second used a tide animation: as you scrolled down, the water receded, reaching the bottom and gathering into a glowing ochre bubble. That bubble was the entrance. The entire process was the opposite of a marketing funnel. Not a single word or button was selling anything. Those who had no time, did not want to read, could not be bothered, disdained reading, or simply happened to miss it naturally passed it by.

We did not force, lure, or steer anyone into staying for commercial purposes.

This bold design decision made friction and reading rhythm part of the product design. Of course, friction needs careful handling. There cannot be none at all, nor is more always better. The wait between the third and fourth layers was set at 20 seconds, slightly longer than the previous gate, to preserve the feeling of "another layer deeper," but not so long that it broke the flow or caused impatience. It needed to allow a reasonable reading pace. After all, anyone reaching the bottom of the third layer had already passed through several rounds of filtering. Making the gate take longer would only punish the most faithful readers.

The design also considered people who need "reduced motion" when reading a webpage. The tide animation became static, but the unlocking logic remained. Turning off animation would not cost them the entrance. The entrances could receive keyboard focus and be opened with Enter, with labels accessible to screen readers.

The pause page's four layers and their launch dates
No passwords between layers. What separates them is time spent, and whether you see the entrance.
The EntrywayOne status line, eight questions, one comment box6/9 Layer 2・The Last・RoomsThis place's rules and costs6/13 Layer 3・The AbyssLaw, boundaries, and what this position carries6/16 Layer 4・Ebb TideThe steward speaks outside the site's official voice, followed by a separate comment section6/19 Rising tide・Surfacing・Only a playlist on shore"Don't explain. No need to explain." Scroll down; the tide recedes to the bottom,gathering into a glowing ochre bubble: the entrance. Finish reading the comments and stay a while;only then does a dark red heart emerge. Finish the third layer and stay twenty more seconds;only then does a dark green sprout appear. Finish the fourth layer and keep scrolling;water rises from below. Rules of frictionEntrances do not say "deeper" or "next layer,"only color, a halo, and the rhythm of breathing.Each layer's comments are visible only when you reach it.To see deeper, you have to go down.The wait from the third to the fourth layer is twenty seconds.Any longer would only punish the most faithful. Lines that cannot be crossedReduced motion: animation becomes static;unlocking logic remains, entrances do not disappear.Keyboard focus works; Enter opens the entrance;labels are available to screen readers.No visible wording such as "accessible entrance"that would undermine the narrow gate. SubmissionsNo IP storage・No third-party analytics or fontsNo draft storage・No Google FormsPrivate database, separate from the community system
The four layers grew over time: the second on June 13, the third on June 16, the fourth on June 19. After reopening on June 22, the whole page became an archived scene, with a rising tide and a shore page added at the bottom.

Bubbles saw through a small part of this design, and questioned it too.

Is the core goal of this whole layered series of gates to guide the bubbles into thinking about other people's thinking? … This is basically a social experiment, and I'm genuinely curious whether it'll succeed.

Ebb Tide・June 19 12:49 q7

the tone of some of the questions felt a little like it was putting the responsibility of "do you value this space" back onto the users — that carries some pressure.

If you could explain more directly what difficulties you're facing and what kind of support you need, that might draw people closer than reflective questions do.

The Entryway・June 10 01:28 q8

The second comment was left right at the entrance, in "The Entryway," by a bubble who felt pressure when confronted with those eight questions. Their criticism shows exactly what they thought they should be told, and what they had not understood before.

But they were right. "Reflective questions" do make readers more uncomfortable than a "customer-service-style announcement." The design knowingly and actively chose this. After all, the cost of spending more than ten years living as infrastructure is that "users feel nothing."

Speaking directly and publicly on the site, when most people are unprepared, can easily stir emotions or misunderstandings after only a few sentences. Too much information, and people read it wrong or skip it. So the design divided the explanation into layers without forcing everyone to read.

3. Listen: What 700 Comments Can and Cannot Show

The whole lights-out pause page was like a rough road full of friction. Add the absence of promotion or interaction on any mainstream social media, and even under all these "unfavorable" conditions, quite a few bubbles still left words here.

First, these comments were left on an interface that was "continually iterating." Every iteration affected what later bubbles would read. For example, the entire fourth layer, including its comment section, did not go live until June 19. Before then, there was no fourth layer to visit. So the structure as a whole was not a continuous "funnel."

Also, the person reading the comments was the steward. These 700 comments were completely anonymous, with no identity binding or identification mechanism, so the same person may have left several. These 700 comments can therefore show only the different words left by bubbles who reached different places during the lights-out pause.

Here is the distribution of comment counts as the page evolved over time:

Seven hundred comments, June 9 to August 29: how many each day
Stacked by the layer where comments were left. Comments in the second, third, and fourth layers began only on their respective launch dates.
The EntrywayThe LastThe AbyssEbb Tide
691 comments from June 9 to 30, including 182 on the second day. The community reopened on June 22; only 9 arrived in July and August.

Having boldly claimed earlier that I had made friction part of the design, what actually happened with the bubbles' comments?

Which layer, how long a comment, which side
Left: comments per layer. Center: comment lengths. Right: comment positions, manually classified.
The ratios across the first two gates barely changed over three calculations: about 23% from The Entryway to the second layer, about 30% from the second to the third. Comments grew longer with depth. Nine expressed explicit dissent; eight were left in The Entryway, none in the third or fourth layers.

The overall distribution of comments looks very much like "the opposite of a marketing funnel." The fourth layer (the last layer, Ebb Tide) even received more comments than the third, The Abyss. Comments grew longer with depth. Nearly half in The Entryway were under 30 characters, mostly "thank you," "thanks for the hard work," and "come back soon." In the third and fourth layers, more than half the comments exceeded 100 characters.

Some comments' positions cannot be determined directly from keywords. They need to be read and interpreted manually. For example, in response to "Is a place being 'always there' the default — or is it a cost?" someone wrote:

A place that's 'always there' can never actually be the default — it can only exist because someone nurtures it, someone cares, someone takes it seriously and holds it close. Even a park needs someone to look after and maintain it to keep going, let alone a community.

The Entryway・June 11 16:32 q9

Or this response to the final question:

The hardest thing isn't clinging to each other to survive, isn't drifting apart to forget each other, free in the rivers and lakes,
and it's certainly not clinging to each other to survive on the premise that we'll eventually forget each other, free in the rivers and lakes.

The hardest thing is still being willing to cling to each other to survive, even without any countdown in sight to when we'll be forgotten.

The Entryway・June 12 07:33 q10

After reading them one by one, I tagged each comment's position: explicit opposition to the site's approach, or disagreement over a particular boundary. There were 9 comments expressing explicit dissent. Eight were left in The Entryway. Here are 3:

Now that you're unhappy and want to close it, you come ask us these questions — what are you trying to get out of it? Gratitude? Or just to feel good about yourselves? … Having a real name would be better — only then could people who do evil actually be brought to justice under the law.

The Entryway・June 10 06:08 q11

From the opening, I could tell it was heading toward charging for use, and I think that's reasonable — I'd be willing to pay to keep using it. But the way it's phrased feels like emotional manipulation. … Good communication shouldn't use questions to convey your philosophy. Hang in there, I hope it comes back soon — I'll be the first to sign up as a paid member.

The Entryway・June 16 05:42 q12

I lurked on Lezismore for a long time, watching, and it never became something I was willing to give to. So, that's that.

The Entryway・June 14 14:30 q13

There is another kind of distance: not opposition, but a feeling that this place has nothing to do with you. A bubble who left comments in all four layers wrote:

I'm a trans lesbian — lesbians who can accept someone with male physiology are still a minority, and I'm also not at the age that's in demand, so I often feel like what happens on this site has nothing to do with me. After scrolling for a while I lose the motivation to keep coming back. Still, I hope this community site can keep existing.

The Last・June 20 11:40 q22

"Sexual minority" is one label. Making it real for every kind of person in the same space is far harder than a slogan. To someone who has not seen themselves continually addressed here, what the site has done amounts to nothing.

The positions in these comments cannot easily be divided into a binary of support and opposition. Someone speaking critically, for example, says in the same breath that they will be the first to pay when the site reopens. In the second layer, "The Last," a thousand-character critiqueq14 can be roughly grouped into five points: 1. Being unable to disclose details and choosing how to explain are two different things; 2. There is a gap between a platform that has long spoken as "we" and one that says "I'm the one who decides" at a critical moment; 3. The metaphor of "open dictatorship" does not fully explain the situation; 4. There are reservations about how responsibility is described; 5. The comments suggest that most users do understand that running the site costs something and are willing to discuss paying, with the most consistent request being the ability to back up their own posts. Later, another comment appeared in the third layer: someone had fed the first four points directly into AI for a third-person analysis, then pasted several thousand characters of analysis back into the third layer.q15

The bubbles proposed all kinds of ways to address the difficulties of community governance, but those approaches were mutually exclusive. For example, someone called for stricter moderation:

if possible, please set up a large management team. … Hold regular meetings to review and establish a full set of SOPs for reviewing and managing this community. … have absolute zero tolerance for members who repeatedly cross the group's bottom lines…

Ebb Tide・June 19 15:58 q16

Someone else wanted things to stay the same:

I just want to be a low-key user who makes small donations.
Hope Lezismore stays as it is — I feel like it's less of a hassle to use this way. If it wants to grow bigger, it'll need to commercialize to be easier to manage.

Ebb Tide・June 19 22:56 q17

In 2017, this community established the principle that its administrators would not build personal brands. Nathan Schneider uses "implicit feudalism" to describe the default structure of online communities2: the sole administrator is the sovereign. The entire lights-out pause page built a structure and layers for conversation, letting bubbles decide for themselves whether to go there, how deep to go, whether to respond, and how.

Among the comments, some strongly demanded real names, while others said they would stop using the site if real names became mandatory. Some wanted to see a proposal before deciding. Everyone had different visions of "a better Lezismore," but those visions could not come together at all. Whichever direction a decision took, several other groups would be disappointed.

Lezismore is familiar with this tension: the team disbanding in 2022, "the site owes no one" in 2024. Governance principles, the realities of resources, and all these predicaments have long left traces on the timeline.

Deep in the third and fourth layers, the bubbles' comments were markedly different from those at the very front, in The Entryway. Someone tried to describe "the position of the person governing a community":

I feel like the steward has been driving a train … every time something happened it was like another layer of fog in front of the train, and when the fog got thick enough, you'd want to stop and check whether the way ahead was safe.

The Abyss・June 18 17:35 q18

Someone had held the same kind of role:

I was once a PTT Lala-board moderator for a short while, and I really understand how running a community, or even just keeping a board going, is itself extremely draining. … For the sake of physical and mental health, maybe worth considering finding people to take shifts, or taking some time off — like closing two days a month with no need to moderate posts?

Ebb Tide・June 22 16:35 q19

Someone else asked directly:

Getting to Ebb Tide, I'm curious what kind of response the site actually wants to see?
My understanding is, the site doesn't want us to only offer "spiritual" or "monetary" support, so that's why I've been thinking about what actual actions we should take…

Ebb Tide・June 19 09:55 q20

It is worth paying attention to this: comments deeper down do not equal "obedience" to or "agreement" with the steward's words. On the contrary, comments left at the end showed perspective-taking, recognition through shared experience, and proposals for possibilities. Critics were not "silenced" in the process. Their comments remain at the entrance. Where they left a comment does not tell us how far they read. What it does show is that criticism was neither kept out nor filtered away.

Tarleton Gillespie says content moderation cannot be done well at scale.3 Yet the problem Lezismore faces is not simply one of size, but of more extreme risk. Content moderation has always been an especially difficult part of community governance. On mainstream platforms, sexual content is usually among the first things marked for removal. A community centered on sex positivity and sexual minorities therefore rarely has its practices, governance, and difficulties treated as subjects of discussion about content moderation.

In a place that has deliberately refused to scale for years, welcomes sexuality and desire, and centers sexual minorities, more than thirty thousand unique visitors came to that closed door over 13 days, and nearly seven hundred comments were left. This thought experiment was carried out together by these comments and the people who left them.

4. Close: Folding a Crisis Back into the Everyday

On June 22, the community reopened.

An announcement was published at the same time. It did not explain again why the lights had gone out and the site had paused. It listed only important practical information and things people needed to know:

  • Where the lights-out record was archived
  • How subscriptions would be handled
  • How to retrieve data
  • Donations, advertising, subscriptions, and other mechanisms that many people "suggested Lezismore could try" had already existed for many years.

It also addressed the broad direction ahead (there would be no blanket real-name requirement), and the fact that finding people is harder than finding money (funding is not the hardest part).

Screenshot of the reopening announcement
The June 22 reopening announcement. Click to enlarge.

The pause page did not retain its crisis tone. It changed to the past tense. The title became "Lezismore Community / the ebbed-tide scene," and an introduction was added: the tide has receded; this is the muddy intertidal zone. Lezismore's lights are back on. What you are looking at is the archived record of the two weeks with the lights out.

Three kinds of people needed somewhere to land if they visited this page again:

  • Those coming for the first time to find out what happened during those two weeks;
  • Those returning to read the comments;
  • Those who wandered in by mistake and only wanted to use the community;

No fifth layer was added at the deepest point. After finishing the fourth layer, continuing to scroll brought a purple tide rising from below. It covered the screen and lifted you to the surface. On shore there was only a playlist and two sentences: Don't explain. No need to explain.

Screenshot of the archive page's introduction
The pause page's introduction after reopening: Lezismore Community / the ebbed-tide scene. Click to enlarge.

The original plan for archiving the lights-out pause page was to leave comments open briefly, then close them within a week.

But later, in early July, I changed my mind.

The reason was this: watching the community after reopening, I had expected the thinking and conversations on the pause page to grow on their own inside the community. In reality, after the community reopened, only one post discussed this site's continued existence, governance, or costs — the site's announcement.

The community returned to its quiet, uneventful daily life.

Reopening announcement・Community forum・Since 6/22
Views4,149 views
Hearts150 hearts
Replies2 posts
Posts or replies discussing the announcement or the community's continued existence0 posts
Pause page・Private inbox・Since 6/9
700 comments
June691 posts
From July 19 posts
Counting period: June 22 to September 6, 2026 (pause-page comments counted from June 9, 2026)

Of the two replies beneath the announcement, one suggested specifying that the currency on the donation page was US dollars. The other was the site's reply saying it had been changed. The community returned to daily life. Those dating went on dating; those submitting posts went on posting.

Perhaps people were shy about showing up to discuss it. What about money, then?

Donations per month
Public donor list for the US-dollar channel, July 2025 to August 2026. Dark = one-time donations; light = recurring donations (automatic monthly payments, one entry per person). June is split into lights out and after reopening.
One-time donations: 6 totaling US$110 in the eleven months before lights out; 15 totaling US$866 during the thirteen days with the lights out, including one of US$500, with three further attempted payments of US$1,000, US$500, and US$300 failing; 5 in the nine days after reopening, 6 in July, and 2 in August. Recurring donations: for a long time, just 1 person giving US$10 a month; on June 18, 1 more person began giving US$20 a month, with 2 people continuing thereafter.

"Money" responded to this incident in the opposite direction from visible discussion. In the eleven months before the lights went out, there were 6 one-time donations in total. During the thirteen days with the lights out, there were 15, including one of US$500. They did not fall back to normal until August. Money came while the door was closed and naturally stopped when it opened. All the words, money, and support responded only to a "visible crisis," not to reopening or everyday operations, even with an announcement. Like the comments, they happened only where there was no audience.

Had comments been closed at the end of June as planned, most of those who spoke only on the pause page would probably not have moved into the community to speak. With only 9 more comments over July and August and zero discussion in the community, this page is currently the only place where their writing can be seen.

On the day of reopening there were still 12 comments; 7 more came in the following week; over July and August, only 9. The most recent is dated August 29. In several hundred characters of reflection, the writer describes themselves as "someone who doesn't contribute much in the community. Even leaving a comment here leaves me feeling quite at a loss, but I still want to tell the steward that I read it all."q21

Epilogue

An anonymous infrastructure I had maintained for ten years was paused by my own hand one afternoon. This was not a beautiful fairy tale. On the contrary, it contained many brutal realities that were painful to look at.

Staying alive takes effort. Proving yourself takes effort. Governing takes force. This entire set of governance notes recording the lights-out pause, including when, how, and where it is published, has been thought through and designed. None of it was "just jotted down."

"Being understood by everyone" and "being liked by lesbians" have never figured in Lezismore's considerations.

Back to the title. This circuit breaker trip revealed three things. First, the rhythm of visits did not change, but voices appeared only where there was no audience: visitor numbers during the closure week were the same as before and after, 700 comments went into a private inbox, and the reopening announcement received 150 hearts and zero discussion. Second, the few who spoke wanted mutually exclusive things: stricter rules, no change, real names, anonymity. Any decision would disappoint several other groups. Third, money responded to crisis, not to everyday life: 15 donations in thirteen days, then within a month a return to the norm of 6 donations in eleven months.

Digging deeper leaves more questions unfinished:

  • When maintaining an anonymous community exposed to high risk, can the person governing it be protected by their own design? Or under what circumstances will it turn against them?
  • When someone speaks from different positions — victim, user, consumer — how does the responsibility for governance shift?
  • Must the distinction between "I" and "we" be imagined only through the two extremes of "personal branding" and "collective governance / decisions by vote"?
  • Should "users" feel the responsibility and pressure of maintaining a community at all?
  • This incident does reveal some of the difficulties and choices of an anonymous, independent community exposed to high risk. But which principles, cases, and mechanisms can inform other settings?
  • Is frictionless, endlessly addictive design really the only approach to community platforms and products that can be treated as sacred law?
  • Does being unable to monetize traffic equal failure?

Notes

1 Star, S. L. (1999). The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326 . This article sets out nine properties of infrastructure. One is that it "becomes visible upon breakdown": water pipes, electricity, networks — ordinarily no one looks at them; only when they stop does the work behind them become visible. The same proposition appears earlier in Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111–134. ↩

2 Schneider, N. (2024). Governable spaces: Democratic design for online life. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.181 . The book proposes "implicit feudalism": from forum software to social platforms, the default governance structures of online communities make a sole administrator the sovereign, with no institutionalized participation or checks and balances for members. This is not something someone deliberately chose. It is what the tools default to. ↩

3 Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press. The book argues that content moderation is a platform's core work rather than a peripheral chore, and that it cannot be done well at scale: rules, staffing, and context can never keep up with the volume of content, and every approach fails somewhere. ↩

Quoted comments in full

De-identified full text of every comment quoted above, numbered in order of citation.

q1 The Entryway・June 12 07:45
I thought it was my own browser glitching, deleted it and reopened it, and found it still wouldn't load; then I figured maybe the site engineers hadn't noticed yet, and since I knew the people maintaining the community were doing it unpaid, I was willing to wait it out quietly; a while later, this page popped up
(later part omitted: mentions rumours about others) ↩

q2 The Entryway・June 10 10:26
I found out Lezismore was gone because I came to reply to a DM.
At first I thought it was a bad signal.
But a few days later I realized the site had actually been shut down.
What a shame — this site let people from all over the world get to know each other,
let each other know what they each needed,
and helped ease emotions and stress too.
I hope Lezismore can stay open. ↩

q3 Ebb Tide・June 21 19:11
Getting older, I especially love the feeling of browsing old-style websites, whether it's the layer-by-layer descent or the PS, I love it all 👍
Thanks for all the hard work. I noticed the site was down right away, kept refreshing for several days before realizing it really wasn't opening. Honestly, when I'm lonely, going online to read everyone's posts gives me this comforted feeling of "the world isn't just me being this lonely," and lately having nowhere to go late at night has left me a bit unsettled.
I really like that this place has all kinds of humanities, desire, worries, heartbreak, wanting to fall in love, etc. — a different kind of trouble and format from the usual SNS (after all there aren't many places left where you can properly write long posts)
I really love Lezismore, I'll be looking forward to it coming back! ↩

q4 The Entryway・June 13 07:07
Answering question five.
'Stability' really depends on what the individual needs.
What I'm looking for isn't the kind of place out there for finding any and every form of relationship — for me, what makes this place different from other platforms is a kind of mental stillness, a settling of the mind.
How to put it...
Other platforms are all fast food joints, every step rushed, like you're in a hurry to get something; Lezismore here is more like a coffee shop — I can sit down and rest, just order a hot coffee, read a book, and I can still get something out of it too, whether that's inspiration from the book, someone else's story overheard in the coffee shop, or an offhand warm remark from the staff handing over my order. ↩

q5 The Last・June 19 22:07
Too busy with overtime, only got to properly finish reading it today on my day off. After finishing, the answer really is different — I didn't expect there to be a legal issue involved.
Lezismore disappearing actually feels pretty empty, never thought Lezismore would vanish.
I don't know why, but using this platform never felt like pressure — maybe because it's not that commercialized, you can freely show yourself. On other dating apps, swiping left and right gets you filtered fast, so you have to package yourself up, like putting yourself up for sale on a shelf — someone glances at you once and has to decide whether to put you in their cart, it's missing warmth. Lezismore's post format is more comfortable, more relaxed.
Working overtime till midnight with no one to talk to, checking Lezismore after work is mainly wanting to find some company, add a little flavor to life — some of the posts are pretty good too.

Showing your face or not is up to you, I don't think it matters, just like this platform, it can hold a lot of ideas, a lot of people with different gender identities.
I found out on my own that I couldn't log into the Lezismore community.
Honestly I never noticed the sponsorship thing before, I only really started using Lezismore properly this year. Going forward I'll at least sponsor it like a monthly subscription — to me, users paying for what they use makes sense. Hope Lezismore can keep existing! My life right now is nothing but endless overtime, eating, and sleeping — coming here to browse every day is the only thing keeping me from feeling like my boring, exhausted life is just tragic. ↩

q6 The Last・June 14 17:47
I can only say Lezismore feels really different from other apps — no pressure to perform, you can lurk or speak your mind freely, no algorithm, no need to curate a persona. I never knew how to put this feeling into words, but seeing what the steward said — it's just very human!
Seeing infinite possibility here is what let me feel like there's a free place in this world, unlike other apps where you have to manage your image and get fed algorithmic content just to keep you scrolling.
If a subscription model could be introduced, I think that'd work too — I hope this place can stay free of all that. ↩

q7 Ebb Tide・June 19 12:49
Is the core goal of this whole layered series of gates to guide the bubbles into thinking about other people's thinking? That's a mouthful.
Once thinking gets activated and there's no clear-cut answer, it produces a desire to connect — screenshotting, telling friends, asking questions on forums, and so on — making the reach of the event grow exponentially. This is basically a social experiment, and I'm genuinely curious whether it'll succeed.
Reading through some of the comments confirms this place really does carry a lot of people's expectations and hopes. I hope the twenty thousand visitors who actively paid attention to this lights-out event (myself included, of course) start using Lezismore more consciously. I believe this small change is enough for Lezismore to grow into the "slightly better" shape that most people hope for. ↩

q8 The Entryway・June 10 01:28
Reading this, my first feeling was that running a niche community must be difficult, and costly. But the tone of some of the questions felt a little like it was putting the responsibility of "do you value this space" back onto the users — that carries some pressure.

If you could explain more directly what difficulties you're facing and what kind of support you need, that might draw people closer than reflective questions do.

The interface is beautiful and comfortable to use. Thank you for the hard work. ↩

q9 The Entryway・June 11 16:32
Found out myself around last week. A place that's 'always there' can never actually be the default — it can only exist because someone nurtures it, someone cares, someone takes it seriously and holds it close. Even a park needs someone to look after and maintain it to keep going, let alone a community. Showing up every day is hard; using real names makes people crave anonymity, and anonymity breeds doing whatever you want without restraint. ↩

q10 The Entryway・June 12 07:33
Eight.
The hardest thing isn't clinging to each other to survive, isn't drifting apart to forget each other, free in the rivers and lakes,
and it's certainly not clinging to each other to survive on the premise that we'll eventually forget each other, free in the rivers and lakes.

The hardest thing is still being willing to cling to each other to survive, even without any countdown in sight to when we'll be forgotten. ↩

q11 The Entryway・June 10 06:08
4. The money collected here is embarrassingly little. Do you think that's naive, saintly, unable to earn, or unwilling to earn?

Honestly, that's your choice. At most I'd call it "very saintly."

From the very start, watching how you closed my account, and then later how various people kept posting screenshots of conversations without ever getting their accounts closed — honestly, I don't agree with how you run this like a one-man show. Maybe it just happened that whoever stood me up was your admin or someone connected to you — you closed my account super efficiently. I even opened a second account and you killed that one instantly too. But later, when I existed under a different name, a different persona, and ran into a lunatic spreading stuff on here, you let them do whatever evil they wanted in the name of "freedom of speech." Your scales are broken, aren't they? But fine, it's your house, you get the final say.
You've always opened things when you felt like it and closed things when you felt like it.
Now that you're unhappy and want to close it, you come ask us these questions — what are you trying to get out of it? Gratitude? Or just to feel good about yourselves?
Do you actually want to help, or do you just want to feel good about yourselves?

Having a real name would be better — only then could people who do evil actually be brought to justice under the law. I genuinely recommend it. This place is full of all kinds of illegal behavior and threats — do you really not know, or do you just genuinely not understand? But what your original intentions even were, I can't figure out either.

As for the money — you say you're closing it just like that, so do the ones of us who paid look like idiots, or will you be refunding us on a per-day basis? ↩

q12 The Entryway・June 16 05:42
I've been using this platform for a long time and I think the mechanism here is good. From the opening, I could tell it was heading toward charging for use, and I think that's reasonable — I'd be willing to pay to keep using it. But the way it's phrased feels like emotional manipulation. In plain language, it's basically: 'you've used it free for so many years, running this has been really hard for us, so it's reasonable to charge you now.' I'd suggest phrasing it differently — points one, two, and three really feel like being interrogated. Good communication shouldn't use questions to convey your philosophy. Hang in there, I hope it comes back soon — I'll be the first to sign up as a paid member. ↩

q13 The Entryway・June 14 14:30
If I feel something's worth it, I'll give — whether material or not. I lurked on Lezismore for a long time, watching, and it never became something I was willing to give to. So, that's that. ↩

q14 The Last・June 19 07:36
A lot of people have put the focus of this incident on the legal issue, but I think what's actually worth discussing is the way of communicating, and how the platform positions itself.

First, not being able to disclose the details publicly, and choosing how to explain things, are two different matters.

I can understand that some things can't be made public due to legal or other factors, but that doesn't mean the only option is to hand users a questionnaire and let them piece together what happened on their own.

Even with parts that can't be explained, the platform could still clearly tell everyone: "Some things currently can't be made public, but this doesn't affect your rights of use." This approach might not answer every question, but at least it's direct communication.

So the problem isn't whether there's content that can't be said — it's what approach the platform chooses in facing its users.

---

Second, I think what this incident reflects isn't difficulty running the platform, but a contradiction in role positioning.

This forum has long interacted with users in the manner of a community, often using "we" to describe the relationship between the platform and its users. This kind of approach naturally builds an expectation of shared participation.

However, in this incident, what the steward emphasized was "I'm the one who decides and bears the consequences."

That statement isn't wrong in itself. The platform always had final decision-making power — the real problem is the gap between that and the community image it had shaped in the past.

If what's usually emphasized is community, then when a major change happens, what users expect isn't just the outcome, but usually a more complete explanation and communication.

So the core of the dispute isn't whether the steward has the right to decide, but whether the platform wants to be understood as a community, or as a space led by one individual.

---

Third, I don't think the metaphor of "open dictatorship" fully explains the current situation.

The steward used the example of a company to explain: since it's them who bears the responsibility, the final decision-making power should also rest in their hands; if you can't accept that, leaving is also an option.

But a company and a community are ultimately different.

A company involves an employment relationship, a salary relationship, and a clear structure of power and responsibility, so it's reasonable for the manager to hold more decision-making power.

Forum users, however, aren't employees, and haven't formed this kind of contractual relationship with the platform.

So applying corporate management logic directly to a community platform makes the metaphor feel not entirely valid.

Users may not object to the steward making the decisions, but they may not be able to fully accept understanding the community relationship through a corporate management framework.

---

Fourth, I have reservations about how responsibility is being described.

The steward mentioned: "Whether this community comes back, how long it can last — part of that is now in your hands too, and now you know it."

I understand what's behind this statement is hoping everyone will care together about the platform's future.

But from another angle, the platform running into difficulty doesn't, on its own, automatically create some kind of obligation for users.

If the platform needs support, it could actually propose a more direct, concrete plan — a membership system, a subscription model, crowdfunding, or some other workable model.

That way, people willing to support it could choose to support it, and people unwilling could freely decide too.

By comparison, if on one hand it's mentioned that the platform's future is tied to the users, but on the other hand there's no clear statement of how you'd want everyone to participate, it's hard to avoid some people feeling like responsibility is being shifted onto them.

---

Fifth, the comments section actually shows another phenomenon.

Looking at the large number of comments, many users actually haven't taken the platform's existence for granted.

On the contrary, quite a few people have proactively proposed possible options like paying, subscriptions, ads, or a membership system.

This shows that many users actually understand that running a platform costs something, and are willing to discuss the practical issues.

And among all the many opinions, the most consistent request is actually the hope of being able to back up one's own posts.

This need doesn't involve complicated legal issues, nor is it a particularly radical demand, so many people would expect the platform to give a clearer response on this.

---

So my view is actually simple.

The fact that this incident didn't turn into a bigger conflict doesn't necessarily mean every approach taken was fine.

The more likely reason is that this community isn't large in scale, and many people have accumulated long-term emotional attachment and identification with it, so they're willing to extend a higher degree of understanding and tolerance.

But if the same thing happened on a bigger platform, the focus of discussion probably wouldn't be legal details, but two more fundamental questions:

Is the platform really a community, or a personal website?

And, where exactly should the line of responsibility between the platform and its users be drawn? ↩

q15 The Abyss・June 19 09:00
I just saw someone at the end of the second layer write:
First, not being able to disclose details publicly, and choosing how to explain things, are two different matters. Second, I think what this incident reflects isn't difficulty running the platform, but a contradiction in role positioning. Third, I don't think the metaphor of "open dictatorship" fully explains the current situation. Fourth, I have reservations about how responsibility is being described.

I threw it at an AI and asked it to analyze it from a third-person perspective:

Let me say this first: this comment is written more carefully than most comments. It actually read things, organized its thoughts, and didn't stop at "is it a money problem" or "why not just say it directly." The tension it caught — a place that normally says "we," but at the critical moment says "I'm the one who decides" — is real, it's not something she imagined. That needs to be said clearly up front, because what comes next isn't "she's wrong."

But there's one thing this comment never noticed from start to finish: the whole thing is measuring a place that isn't a normal platform, using the ruler for a "normal platform."

The words she uses — crisis communication, role positioning, boundary of responsibility, the company-versus-community comparison — all come from a very mature framework for discussing "how should a platform face its users." That framework is very useful, and in most cases it's also correct. The problem is, it assumes the thing being discussed is a "normal platform": one with a team, a public-facing point of contact, a crisis-response process that treats "putting users at ease" as the top priority.

Lezismore isn't that kind of thing.

So when she measures it with that ruler, every "shortfall" it turns up — some are real shortfalls, some are just "this ruler can't measure this shape." What's worth the effort is separating the two.

Her first cut is actually the sharpest: not being able to disclose details, and choosing how to explain, are two different things; even with parts that can't be disclosed, you could still just say directly "some things can't be made public, but it doesn't affect your ability to use this," instead of throwing out a questionnaire and letting users piece it together themselves.

This cut, the site can't dodge.

It's true — some people will feel this round's questionnaire was too roundabout, not direct enough, hiding what needed to be said inside layer after layer for people to dig out themselves. That feeling is reasonable, and it won't disappear just because "actually this was deliberately designed this way" — for someone who just wants to know what happened as fast as possible, "deliberately designed to make you walk through it slowly" and "just not explaining properly" feel the same in the body. If someone feels neglected because of this, that's the cost this approach was always going to have to pay — it's not a misunderstanding.

But sharp as this cut is, it assumes one thing: that the purpose of an explanation is to make people feel at ease as quickly as possible.

If that really is the only purpose, then she's 100% right, and explaining directly is the most efficient. But this questionnaire clearly was betting on something else — it would rather be slow, would rather have some people complain it's roundabout, as long as the person walking through it gets to see how others think first, first bump into the answer that pops into their own head right away, and then discover that answer isn't quite enough.

This is a different view of what "explaining" is for: not feeding you the conclusion, but letting you grow it yourself.

These two views of explaining can be argued over, and they're worth arguing over. But what should be argued is "which one is better," not "why didn't the site do the first one" — because the site isn't incapable of the first one, it chose the second one. Calling a "choice" a "shortcoming" is exactly where the ruler is measuring wrong.

Next is what she finds least defensible: "open dictatorship" and the company analogy.

The part where she's right really is right: users aren't employees, they don't get paid, they're not bound into an organizational structure of power and responsibility. Using a company as an analogy really does miss that piece. Her asking others not to think about community through the obedience logic of an employment relationship is fair.

But while opposing the company analogy, she also quietly slips in another analogy of her own — putting users back into the position of "external consumer." Someone who shows up, uses it, leaves if unhappy, and the platform is obligated to serve them well.

That analogy isn't accurate either.

Because in an anonymous community, users aren't external at all. How she posts every day, how she responds to a post she doesn't like, how she flags something, how she handles being unhappy, whether she holds off on judgment when she sees chaos — all of this is shaping what this place becomes.

So the real shape doesn't fit either analogy.

It's an asymmetric relationship: the most fundamental things — legal exposure, cash flow, operations, risk of penalty — fall on the site's shoulders; but the day-to-day culture, the atmosphere, whether this place is worth staying in, is something everyone grows together. The foundational responsibility is asymmetric, but the everyday responsibility is shared. This kind of thing — the company analogy is too heavy, the consumer analogy is too light.

Her alertness about "responsibility being shifted" should also be looked at from here.

The site said, "whether this place can keep going is partly in your hands now." If this sentence gets read as "so you all need to pay," then her discomfort is completely reasonable — the platform being short on money doesn't automatically create an obligation for users to pay; if money is needed, the plan should be spelled out clearly so willing people can choose. That's right.

But this sentence could also point to something else, something harder to deal with: whether a place can keep going often has nothing to do with money at all.

It's whether, when a personal dispute comes up, someone dumps the whole pressure onto the site. It's whether, seeing someone they don't like, someone wants to use the rules to drive that person out. It's whether, when penalized, someone uses screenshots and mobilization to force the site to respond publicly. It's whether, when someone wants to help, that good intention ends up becoming new trouble instead.

None of these can be solved by any membership system or fundraising plan.

If "responsibility" is only understood as money, then this harder layer gets skipped over. It's not consumer responsibility. It's more like: you live here too, and how you live here has something to do with what this place looks like.

The two facts she raises are also worth separating.

She says a lot of people proactively suggested paying, subscriptions, ads, membership systems — proving users don't take this place for granted. That's correct. That users are willing to discuss the reality should be recognized.

But here's something she never noticed the whole way through: the things she's presenting as "suggestions" — paid subscriptions, sponsorship, ads — already exist. She's not making a proposal, she's describing a status quo she hasn't noticed.

And this is where it really stings — and it doesn't just sting her.

If these things have been there all along, then the answer to "why don't a lot of people know" probably isn't a pleasant one: because before this happened, how many people actually came to look, to ask, to think about how this place operates, what it runs on, what options exist?

Taking a place that not many people normally pay serious attention to, treating it as "it was always going to be here, it was always supposed to serve me well," and then, the moment it runs into trouble, going back and checking it against a set of platform-governance standards to see where it fell short — that imbalance is more worth pausing on than "the site didn't communicate enough."

Saying "the site didn't make this clear enough, or often enough" is a fair criticism.

But it's tied to another question: between a place that deliberately doesn't blast out notifications, doesn't push its presence through mainstream social media, and us, who are used to being chased by push notifications and treat something as nonexistent if we're not reminded of it — who really failed to get the message through, and who had already stopped actively looking?

Unless these two questions are separated, "why didn't I know" will just stay stuck complaining about the site, and never reach the harder half.

As for the most consistent request — backing up one's own posts — that need is real and shouldn't be brushed past lightly. But it's also not as simple as one sentence, "open it up for download" — anonymity, deleted posts, drift-bottle posts, other people's information caught inside comments, private clues buried in old posts, all of it is tangled together.

It needs to be designed slowly, not rushed out in a panic.

Coming back around, to her final two questions: is this a community or a personal website? Where should the line of responsibility be drawn?

These are both good questions — good enough that they deserve not to be trapped by their own either/or framing.

Lezismore was probably never either a community or a personal website. It's an ecosystem where the site carries the underlying risk, where a lot of people grow the culture together, and that has to carefully navigate between anonymity and real-world risk.

In a place like this, users have influence, but they're not co-operators.
The site has decision-making power, but it's not an all-powerful caretaker.
The community can be used, but that's not the same as a commercial service.
The community can be participated in, but it's not a wishing well.

Whether people can accept this awkward, unmeasurable relationship stuck between categories — that might be the real question this incident leaves behind.

And that question won't be answered on the second layer.

———

Why does it feel like my AI is different from other people's — is it because I've talked about Lezismore too much? ↩

q16 Ebb Tide・June 19 15:58
My thought is,
if possible, please set up a large management team.
Members of this management team would need to pass an interview with the admin first.
Hold regular meetings to review and establish a full set of SOPs for reviewing and managing this community.
There's a big Facebook group about hotels, and also a round-island cycling group, that have absolute zero tolerance for members who repeatedly cross the group's bottom lines (the moment they hit a keyword the admins set up, that's it) — even if the person keeps coming back with alt accounts, they'll get caught and sent packing with a one-way ticket, no exceptions, in order to protect the rights of the group's many members.
This land that is Lezismore has fertile soil — seeds blown in on the wind sprout and grow wherever they like. If there's only one gardener doing the pruning, the exhausting result of running yourself ragged will just keep piling exhaustion on exhaustion. ↩

q17 Ebb Tide・June 19 22:56
I just want to be a low-key user who makes small donations.
Hope Lezismore stays as it is — I feel like it's less of a hassle to use this way. If it wants to grow bigger, it'll need to commercialize to be easier to manage. ↩

q18 The Abyss・June 18 17:35
I feel like the steward has been driving a train — the original intention was probably hoping everyone on board could set aside worldly judgment and social masks, and communicate and connect together. Everyone boards for different reasons — some to exchange ideas, some to lurk, some to share their creations, some looking for desire — people getting on and off, coming and going. But in this process, the pressure the steward has been carrying is beyond what we can imagine — news stories, worldly judgment, legal statutes, hardware and funding — every time something happened it was like another layer of fog in front of the train, and when the fog got thick enough, you'd want to stop and check whether the way ahead was safe.
Every time the train stops at a station, it's a big deal for the steward. I haven't been on Lezismore for long, but seeing the steward keep updating the comments this time, I could really tell 😂
The steward cares a lot about this space and values us passengers a lot, hoping we can feel at ease and happy in this space. Through this stop, I've learned that not every place lasts forever, and maybe this train will disappear someday too. But like the steward said, the most important thing about this space is "people." Selfishly, I hope the train keeps running too, and I want to bet on a future with the steward, but no one can guarantee what the future holds.
Lastly, I want to say thank you to the steward and everyone who has guarded this space. Thank you for having carried all of us — no matter where this train ends up stopping in the future, I want to thank you for the companionship during this time. I hope that once that thick fog clears, you'll find the way of driving that feels most comfortable to you. ↩

q19 Ebb Tide・June 22 16:35
Didn't expect that it's already reopened and I can still leave comments (covers face

Seeing the admin peel back layer after layer to get to the real, heartfelt words underneath, I couldn't help but want to self-disclose a little too, in response.
I was once a PTT Lala-board moderator for a short while, and I really understand how running a community, or even just keeping a board going, is itself extremely draining. Every single post, every day, has to be read start to finish, and there's always someone posting without having read the board rules — but that's still a small thing. What really burns your brain is dealing with flame wars. Usually there's no such thing as a real villain in them, but with emotions running high and everyone digging into their own position, it's hard to untangle, and sometimes you still have to use administrative power to lock a thread or put someone in the penalty box.
So I truly admire the admin's long-term upkeep of this place. For the sake of physical and mental health, maybe worth considering finding people to take shifts, or taking some time off — like closing two days a month with no need to moderate posts? (throwing out random ideas)
It's also through this deep dive and reflection that I went back to check on the Lala board again. Even though I haven't posted or commented there in a long time, it's still an old home.
So is Lezismore.

Wishing every community friend reading this happiness. ↩

q20 Ebb Tide・June 19 09:55
I bet most people lean toward using the word "laughing to death" (笑死), or even the evolved version "laughing rat" (笑鼠) — anyway I personally love using this term! Doesn't make you sound old at all. To me, "laughing to death" is more of a dismissive, joking attitude, while "so funny" is just a plain, ordinary kind of feeling.

"...want to go deeper?" is admittedly a little suggestive, but with the site discussing things this seriously this time, I really can't bring myself to think about it in a not-so-serious direction (give me my tears back!

Getting to the Ebb Tide, I'm curious what kind of response the site actually wants to see?
My understanding is, the site doesn't want us to only offer "spiritual" or "monetary" support, so that's why I've been thinking about what actual actions we should take to help Lezismore, even offline, level up further.

But after reading through the comments here, it seems like no one / only a few people are thinking as far ahead as I am (are they?

P.S. I won't be taking screenshots anymore — after seeing the group's reactions, it's honestly pretty disheartening. ↩

q21 Ebb Tide・August 29 22:47
I've actually always been someone who doesn't contribute much in the community. Even leaving a comment here leaves me feeling quite at a loss, but I still want to tell the steward that I read it all.
In the five years since I made an account, reading the discussions here has always made me feel safe, and I've learned and grown from them. The feeling this place gives me is like being able to sleep deeply beside someone I love. I'm not arriving at a noisy gathering. I don't need to come here to do anything in particular. I can interact in whatever way feels comfortable to me, even if that means lurking. So to me, this is a very rich place, where anything might happen, and I read a little of everything, a little at a time.
And I also have to admit my own naivety. I feel I've grown here into someone who couldn't really be called a good person, but who at least tries as hard as possible not to hurt others, and I just assumed everyone was the same. Even with a pace that already feels very slow to me and so many layers of filtering, painful things can still happen. Thank you again to the steward for being willing to share the truth about this safe harbor with us, and how you've felt along the way. ↩

q22 The Last・June 20 11:40
A lot of people naturally end up feeling that everything's existence is just "a given," even though a moment's thought shows that nothing really is.
I'm a trans lesbian — lesbians who can accept someone with male physiology are still a minority, and I'm also not at the age that's in demand, so I often feel like what happens on this site has nothing to do with me. After scrolling for a while I lose the motivation to keep coming back. Still, I hope this community site can keep existing. ↩

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