Gay NSFW Social Network

[FireDog]

So as you may (or more likely may not) know I have been playing with an idea to create a NSFW social network for some time and now I finally did it, so I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.

Long story short is that anyone can create a profile, upload a pictures, galleries, videos, GIFs, which others can like, share (to their profile/groups), bookmark, etc. The users also have the option to share the post publicly or make it visible only to members or friends, and can also tag others, use hashtags, etc.

To get some content, I created a few profiles for a few studios and you can check it out on https://freefans.me

If you want to test it and see features non-logged users can’t, you can try this account:

u: demontester
p: oGw3lyCbgoI3KK8QlRepM1lZ

It’s still under the development and I will likely make lots of adjustment and whether I will add new features will depends on how this will go. If you have suggestions, please let me know.

[GayDemon]

Looks nice, simple, clean.

Is it like only fans then? but free to browse? no donations?

[FireDog]

Thank you, I am glad you like it.

Yes, it is free. The idea is that you can show people what you do and add links to your paid content directly to the post or to your profile, or you can do it just for fun… or you can promote your own website, like you do on Twitter with aff content.

Unlike Twitter, there is no shadow banning, algorithm suppression, etc. However, popular content gets “boosted” if certain conditions are met. (the number of views, likes, shares…).

[GayDemon]

And you built this CMS yourself?

[FireDog]

well, since I am not interested in some assholes hacking the website, it is using WP as core, with some heavy modifications. The AI is great help with this if you understand each other.

[FireDog]

So me and my fellow AI have been working hard on some changes, fixing issues, making it more fit for purpose, etc. and I have some first test subjects and it is not performing totally horribly, people are coming back, interacting with reposts, likes, bookmarks, comments…

There are three usage cases, content creators (studios, onlyfans) - they can promote their content, i.e. CockyBoys – FreeFans

Then affiliate websites can promote their blogs, i.e. Gay Porn Zone – FreeFans

and users can follow their favorite blogs, perfomers, studios, etc.

Unlike Twitter, this is not data harvesting platform and no content is suppressed, so if you post regularly, you have the same chances of building follower base as any other user.

I decided to promote a few studios on their behalf that have good content, but their promo videos are way too short to bother for my other website, i.e. cockyboys, belami, etc.

If I actually manage to get enough people to make it worth it and sustainable, that’s something only time will tell I guess.

[GayDemon]

I think it’s a fun site you created but I got a feeling that using WordPress will be your biggest limitation. It’s not a good CMS and does not scale very well at all.

[FireDog]

Could you be more specific? I mean I have been working with Wordpress since forever (version 2.5 or something like that) and I never had any issues.

But I think the biggest downfall will be not getting enough traffic like always, so people won’t be really motivated to contribute to that website, etc.

It ain’t easy to get enough traffic for an adult website. I had some spare cash on JuicyAds so just for fun I purchased an ad on dude-dump, it costs me $15/week and I got 1 click. Great way to waste money

[GayDemon]

It’s PHP to start with which has security issues …

Have you ever taken a look at the underlying HTML code for the pages WordPress creates? It’s so bloated and badly coded. I counted:

48 Stylesheets
52 javascripts

That’s a crazy number. You have to remember that when Google ranks pages they look at different factors, several are related to loading speed, what resources it loads and how. You can check it using Google Page Speed

I think the biggest issue will be handling a lot of users but I guess that will be a nice problem to have if that would happen.

I’m guessing you are using some type of community plugin, basically you’re tied into and limited to whatever the plugin does. Rather than creating something unique you’re using something that a lot of other wordpress sites already have.

Sorry I don’t want to discourage you or take away from the work you put in. We have to use what we have or able to do. Just think WordPress is tricky to use for building a new Social network.

[GayDemon]

And yes, you cannot build a free site using paid advertising. You need to attract users by creating unique content that keeps them engaged.

[Daniel_Ryder]

Just to maybe be some help here, I get what Bjorn is saying, your own CMS over WP in the longer term would be beneficial, but moving to your own CMS can be an option in future, should the site grow well, although migration from WP might be a bit more than a headache.

For now though maybe check out https://perfmatters.io/ (paid plugin) it allows you to control scripts and stylesheets on a per post type/page type/url basis. One of the biggest issues you will find is every plugin is loaded on every page, this plugin allows you to counteract that (in most cases at least) it shows all the scripts loaded on a page and lets you disable one by one, as well as having a bunch of other optimization features there also, but the ability to hit “script manager” in the header and see what’s slowing a page down has saved me countless hours over the years.

If you want to trail it on staging drop me a message and I can throw you a copy of the plugin for testing (it wont update though as you would need to buy the licence key ect).

Overall site looks great and I really hope you see some traction… A previous company I worked with toyed with the idea of a gay social network, backwards as it sounds I would focus more on twitter for traffic, from memory 60+% of our engaged members were sourced through tweets, also building a small facebook group aimed at gay men (but kept strictly SFW, and keeping your homepage of your site SFW also) was a good source for members but less engaged ones.

[FireDog]

Thank you, I really appreciate and understand what you saying.

I mean, the main reason I work with Wordpress is because it’s just me working on websites and my time and knowledge has its limits. Sure, the PHP is not perfect and there were/are security issues, but you could say that about everything. I mean Wordpress has been around for decades and has dedicated team that is addressing any security issues and I am pretty sure they are much better at that I ever could be.

As I said, I have been working with Wordpress since early stages and learned many things hard way and very painfully, but I always try to learn and improve.

When it comes performance and scaling it up, that’s the one thing I learned hard way and I mentioned this story before. Basically, I lost one of my first website that was quite popular because of my amateurism and little knowledge at that time.

So, although it may not be perfect, I created this website with those things in mind. I no longer use shared hostings, but I am building websites on AWS or DO, the content people upload to the website is automatically offloaded to S3 storage and served via CDN and finally, the website is build on LiteSpeed server, which is very fast.

The reason why the Page Speed Score is not so good is only because I haven’t configured and properly tested the cache plugin, so the caching plugin is disabled as of right now. I focused on modifying functionality, security, backup and content first, but I think I am absolutely ready to scale it up if the website would get popular.

I just thought that caching as of right now was not that important because the website is performing fine (at least from my view).

However, here is the screenshot of Page Speed result when I enabled caching plugin with score 94 for performance and 96 for best practices.

One again, I really appreciate everything you said and if you have anything else you would change, done differently, etc, please do let me know.

[FireDog]

Hi Daniel, thank you for your feedback and suggestions. I remember you mentioned about a year ago that you were working for a company that was playing around with this concept, and I also remember you mentioned that one of the problems was the undeployability of the app due to the NSFW nature, right?

I mean, I’ve been playing around with the idea as well, because I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and wanted to get it out of my head. I don’t think it would become so popular that Wordpress wouldn’t be enough, but if it did, it would be a completely different situation. I’d probably have enough resources to work on it with someone else, work on migrating it to something custom created, etc. but I don’t think there’s any reason to think about it right now, because the chances of it never happening are far greater than the chances of it happening.

As for the performance and optimization itself, I guess I’d just echo what I said to Bjorn. The site is built on a LiteSpeed server that has its own caching plugin, I’m not entirely sure if perfmatters.io would really be compatible with LiteSpeed server, but I really appreciate the offer

And btw. I’m really glad you like the site, it means a lot to me.

[twynkWorld]

Wordpress isnt a issue at all. It can even run headless if you wish so and you would use another framework (like react, vue or node.js) to get content through rest api. means WP would never be exposed to customers at all and would be only used to manage content.

and saying php has security issues… ehm, nothing is free from security flaws.
i would rather trust wordpress and php above any custom cms.
unless you let it go through a deep audit by a entity which really knows security (there are maybe 10-20 companies in the world which i would say really know to find every loophole), its way more secure to run wordpress.

as you use litespeed, you wont have any issues with performance, that thing can handle tons of requests with caching enabled, even on a low end server spec.

didnt look into your site to be honest, but software stack seems ok.

[mrmagoo2022]

I thought Google scrapped page speed as a ranking factor now?

[FireDog]

Yeah, I think Bjorn has personal beef with Wordpress. I mean I could say the same thing about Joomla or Drupal, I give it a try like 20 years ago, didn’t like it and eventually moved to Wordpress. I think around 46% of all websites in the world run on Wordpress, so…

[GayDemon]

I do have some Wordpress sites as well, but you’re right I don’t like it and have had a lot of bad experiences when using it. I prefer to have full control of the code and design, not relying on when someone updates a theme or plugin, or not.

Word Press definitely has its uses and there sure are a lot of word press sites out there, it’s a great solution in many cases for smaller sites. But I’m pretty sure you won’t find a any larger social network built on WordPress. To me it similar to when I see paysites using wordpress, it just never works as well as a purpose built membership CMS like NATS.

But you have to use what’s available to you and if you do end up growing a lot, perhaps you can then think about migrating to something else.

[FireDog]

Yeah, exactly. It’s not perfect, but it has the basic social media functions like likes, reposts, followers, comments, timeline, etc. I think for the little experiment it should do fine, it it will became popular and there will be need to switch it to something custom crafted, it would likely generate enough means for doing so, but there is no point to waste thousands of hours and dollars on something that simply may not work.