When I first listened to Maymay ‘s presentation , I’ll admit my reaction was emotionally-based — I love FetLife, and how dare he say that it’s bad for the community? Insular? Pfah, it’s got all kinds of people on there! And he’s bashing it on the one hand for not being safe enough because its only safety feature is being non-indexable by search engines, and then bashing it again for being non-indexable by search engines! He calls FetLife a technological monoculture [ 1 ] ; what the hell?!
But having the self-awareness to realize that I was perhaps biased, I took a moment and went over his points again in my head. And after doing so, I have to say that I agree with those points.
First off, neither he nor I are saying that FetLife shouldn’t exist, or that people should stop using it. I think that a lot of people read the title of his article/presentation, and immediately think that’s what he’s saying. So what is he saying? As I understand it: