I'm in finanical trouble

Futureporn is an unofficial, fan-made NSFW archive of Lewdtuber livestreams. Originally started as a ProjektMelody-only library, the mission has expanded to become the Galaxy's Best VTuber Hentai site.

This mission has been fraught with peril. I've been banned from at least 3 cloud hosting providers. I've struggled to scale infrastructure, I'm often unable to meet visitor expectations.

I want to improve. I want to bring people satisfaction and deliver a service that is worthwhile, but I'm struggling. The financial strain has taken a toll, and I'm at a point where I have to consider doing something else.

Is Futurenet destined to fade into obscurity before ever reaching orbit?

"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that."

I won't go out without a fight!

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I've been thinking a lot about last month's Patreon poll. Multi-vtubers is the most desired feature, followed by Stream Archive. This brought me to draft Futureporn's design requirements going forward.

Data integrity is number one. People want the vods to last forever, and I agree.

Number two is sustainability-- the project won't last if I can't come up with a way to pay bills.

Accessibility is number three. People want to actually watch the VODs from time to time, and of course it makes sense-- that's the internet standard.

I have lots of goals and plans for Futureporn but they're not realistic on my income. To illustrate how bad things are, my 2023 total income across all sources was $8,000 USD. No, I did not forget a zero. This is much less than a living wage in the US where I live. I've been hobbling along supported by patrons, friends, family, and government assistance.

The one thing keeping me sane throughout this journey has been my bicycle. Last year I was riding at least 10 miles a day, 5 days a week. I rode so much that I wore out parts on my bicycle. It is currently at the bike shop and I can't go get it because I can't pay the bill. Taxes are upcoming and I usually owe several hundred dollars in Self Employment taxes. I had to ask my mother for money to pay my dentist bill. I've been selling assets on eBay trying to make ends meet. I've been under a lot of stress.

I need to earn more money

I think I have three choices.

1. Continue as-is until my financials break, I can't pay bills, and Futureporn dies.

2. Back off Futureporn, get a full time job doing something else, and Futureporn dies from neglect and decay.

3. Build the next featureset, balance part-time jobs, and Futureporn lives another day.

I'm not in the quitting mood, so the obvious choice is number three.

The Altruism Paradox

My funding mechanism right now is patron accounts which have access to video sources provided by Content Delivery Networks. The idea is that anons can watch videos using the IPFS video sources. 

For a fee, visitors can access the faster, more consistently reliable CDN video sources.

I'd like to be more like xvideos or pornhub, where videos are free and fast for all visitors. The problem is that this cost a shitton of money to pull off. Wikipedia says xvideos brings in 100s of millions of dollars a year. As I suggested earlier, I don't have that. I can't compete.

The paradox comes from wanting to serve more people by making all videos fast and free. If videos are free, why become a patron? Without patron funding, we don't have a website.

I've been operating this way, but I think I might be wrong. I firmly believe open information and open protocols always win. Just look at the internet; I don't pay a fee to use TCP/IP.

Multi-VTubers is live

I put in the work and now el_xox is on the site. Finally I can put a checkmark in this goal. This is one small step towards the Future of Futureporn, but there is a lot more that has to be done in order for a giant leap to occur.

Firstly, there are some bugs. The /vt/el_xox page is currently throwing an error when you visit it, so the only way to watch her vods right now is from the main page. I've found the root cause and I'm working on getting the fixes deployed. That'll take a few days because code deployments are also broken at the moment.

Over the horizon

With the new design requirements in mind, my plan for 2024 is to squash bugs and deliver vibrator integration. I say squash bugs but really that encompasses a lot of things. The video processing backend has become semi-automated, but it's not automatic enough. It still takes me an hour or two to get new VODs published and there is a lot of manual copy-pasting that takes place.

I think implementing user submitted content is extremely important to sustainability. I'm overworked as-is, and I can't keep up with all the lewdtubers that are popping up. 

I have an uploads page prototype with a moderation workflow, but I realized I was getting ahead of myself. The video processing backend is not ready for user uploads.

Black Hole

One thing I've been thinking about a lot is how I don't know what Futureporn is from a first-principles viewpoint. Yes it's a place to watch vtuber porn livestream vods, but I think there's more to it. People want to know things and get answers. For me personally I have a toy obsession, and want to know the make and model of every toy Melody uses.

Futureporn can be a place to find things out. It can be a lewdtuber knowledge site in the same way that vtuber-centric wiki sites serve knowledge for SFW content. It can be a lot more, too. We're limited only by our imagination, and... funding.

Great Filter

99% of small business fail.

The choices I make could make or break this project at any moment, and right now I'm feeling pretty fragile. I don't like to write about this because I think it's bad for marketing. I want to talk about tech and ideas and hype up the project and paint a picture of a solid foundation and a scenario where the only direction we can go is up.

In reality, I've been burnt out for months. There's a never ending pile of work in front of me and I work for free. Sure I bring in $600+ a month from patrons, but then I've got a monthly Mux bill for $200, a Contabo bill for $200, a Vultr bill for $100, a Bunnyway bill for $100, a Fly.io bill for $30.

I'm fucking mental for continuing this.

But that's what founders do. Founders work for free, building a thing that doesn't exist because it needs to exist.