Show HN: I built an active community of trans people online
t4t.socialA year ago I surveyed the internet and noticed there was only one popular space for trans and gender-non-conforming people to meet; Lex.
Lex is not well liked by its users. Its software feels heavy and it is full of cash grabs and anti-patterns. It was recently acquired and is sure to only become more hostile to its users as it turns towards profit generation.
With this in mind I built t4t, an alternative specially designed for not only queer people, but specifically trans people.
It is an extremely lightweight service. I built it with my most ideal stack: Flutter, Svelte, Supabase, Posthog.
It has grown in the last year to about 4,000 monthly active users. I think it could grow way beyond that this year.
The biggest piece of feedback I think I have gotten from posting here is that the nsfw content is a bit shocking which I get. Sorry about that.
My guess is that if you just scrolled twitter or whatever by new exclusively unfiltered you wouldn’t have that different an experience.
On the one hand I do think there is something interesting about the rawness of this network but also some sort of smart nsfw filtering is clearly needed, and I've been in the bubble of making this long enough to have become a bit desensitized.
I will get that shipped within the week!
Several US states now require age verification for adult content (I don't know how that is defined). A case challenging such laws is being considered by the US Supreme Court, but most experts believe the court will allow the age verification.
That may mean users identifying themselves, which seems dangerous. (It should not at all be dangerous, but it is.) All you need is some phobic government official to sue or investigate you, for any reason they can come up with, and demand all your records as part of their lawsuit/investigation.
Perhaps there's a way to do age verification while minimizing privacy risks? For example, verify their age, give them their credentials, then delete the PII? I don't know if that would suffice if your age verification practices were challenged.
(Talk to an expert.)
You can use cryptography to perform parts of verification. Specifically, you can use anonymous credentials to prove to a specific website that you have a credential. But that credential must then be issued by some authority that actually examines your physical "proof of age" (driver's license etc.) and issues it to your device.
The problem is that, at least at the moment, simply obtaining a credential like this has a huge chilling effect. You need to mail stuff into some crummy company chosen by the government, which then processes it and takes time. That company might be breached, which identifies you as "a person who is specifically interested in accessing adult content." Many of these problems can theoretically be fixed, but fixing them would have to be the goal of the authorities -- and I suspect it is not.
> "a person who is specifically interested in accessing adult content."
Or at more risk, a person interested in trans content.
And in the very near future, perhaps someone who is interested in accessing non-adult content that simply covers topics that are considered "unwholesome."
> Perhaps there's a way to do age verification while minimizing privacy risks? For example, verify their age, give them their credentials, then delete the PII?
I wonder why trusted third parties haven't sprung up around this very concept to the degree of OIDC (it's almost everywhere), you could have companies that allow uniquely identifying people, without having to manage or even get their PII directly.
Service wants to check age or whether user is banned --> they are redirected to some-identity-platform.com where they can deal with any ID documents and other PII --> some-identity-platform.com gives back a token and a UUID, so all the service really needs is a JSON object with the UUID and whether user is of age (if that was in scope).
That service can also let the user granularly choose what information to return: just the UUID, whether they're of age, or specific data like where they're located, actual PII if needed (e.g. auth with govt. site) etc., the UUIDs could also be service specific, so they cannot be cross referenced across different sites in case of leaks.
Things a bit like that exist, for example here's a few random ones:
It does feel like the privacy problem could be solved in exactly these services, without passing too much information to the service itself. Because currently there are crazy amounts of hate and content out there that I might not want from a certain person on a site I operate, so I could just ban 914582c9-289a-4f8c-9e1c-f4193066e210 and the same person (at least with the same legal identity) could never get another account on my platform. I wouldn't even know that it's John Doe from country X and region Y that's uploading problematic content. Vice versa, I might just sell stuff to 5b9ee810-605b-40ce-9ead-85102e92df74 without ever risking compromising their identity.Because verification requirements are merely indirect means to suppress contents. It really doesn't matter if the actor is 14 or 40 and it's never about making sure it's the latter.
> the UUIDs could also be service specific, so they cannot be cross referenced across different sites in case of leaks.
Assuming services play nice. What if they start sharing UUIDs amongst each other, for example for advertising purposes?
Worse what is stopping companies from creating both service and verifier? Nothing, as Amazon already has both. I do not trust them not to abuse this.
And even if in theory all companies do the respect my privacy. I am one government away, from seeing a law passed, that makes it mandatory to report all UUIDs to the government. The potential for tracking is off the charts.
Right now it takes forever to trace everything. You can realistically only do it for a select targets. If you implement this UUID system, suddenly it becomes much easier to trace everyone's actions.
I am not an expert either, but I have read that it requires at least 33% of content being "adult". Not sure how much content this page have, and OP should get in contact with an expert (maybe a trans lawyer or sth would be more willing to help such a project?) but i assume that the most important would be to ensure that NSFW content is below 1/3, like twitter (twitter has a huge lot of porn but even more non-porn content)
If you don't do age verification then your need to comply with COPPA etc as you have to assume underage users.
My previous employer used twohat to monitor for content dangerous to underage users, but I don't know if they were any good as it's not my area. It looks like they got bought by Microsoft as twohat.com redirects to a Microsoft product page now
Age verification could be possible without giving out PII e.g. via Zero Knowledge proofs. This would of course need a central authority that is trusted to give out per person digital IDs. Usually that would be the government.
All the porn companies have handled this by simply blocking the sites in the states in question, just forcing people to use VPNs. If you ask for ID verification to see NSFW content they know hardly anyone would provide it, and at the same time it opens you up to a lot of liability in handling extremely sensitive PII.
The whole thing is just moralistic BS anyway. I'm sure most kids can figure out how to use a VPN better than adults.
> just forcing people to use VPNs
Does this really even work? The law isn't "if the user's ip address appears to be from this state, then you must require id".
Properly enforcing georestrictions like this costs money and destroys businesses, but that is kinda the point.
It provides plausible deniability. "We did our best, judge"
It's not even plausible deniability, it's literally "how are we supposed to know what location people are in other than ISP?" That's the de facto determinate of location online. The government hasn't taken the position that a bar checking driver's licenses to confirm someone's age provides "plausible deniability", but rather that they're doing their part to comply with the law, even if some users are going to use fake IDs to cheat the system.
1/ block data center connections / require users to connect via a residential IP, not cell phone.
2/ request GPS location from the device.
3/ request WiFi location from the device.
4/ require billing address to be out of state. (States collect sales tax based on billing address, not where the service or product is bought. So I think this is fair.)
No, but they have deniability. “We checked, and they weren't in your state as far as we can tall”.
Slightly aside, if you filter like this for any reason it is safer to check that the request is NOT coming from some other location – that way your main failure mode is accidentally screening someone in a state you don't need to, not accidentally letting someone in that you could face legal action for, though this is a harder check to make.
The blocked people that use VPNs may well appear to be coming from a non-US location too which probably makes the denial slightly safer.
I’m sorry but business success aside, how else do you propose to do it? Require them to go outside and take a panoramic video including their face that somehow also captures third-party information about the date and time and then feed it into geoguessr?
Couple thoughts:
1/ if the company can’t meet the regulations, it can’t exist.
2/ if there is wiggle room of “as long as you tried your best, then it’s ok”, then requesting gps location, nearby wifi nodes, and banning traffic from data centers, then that would be better.
I think the problem is that laws that are trying to force morality on people.
The general problem is that web site X doesn't know if user Y lives in state Z. And most of the realistic ways to allow them to know this are huge PII disasters waiting to happen. This has nothing to do with morality. If states wanted to ban HN, it would be just as ridiculous. Using IP address is about as pointless as using your mobile phone's area code.
No, the problem is unchecked moral panicking. IP geoblocking is mitigation.
All laws force morality on people.
> If you ask for ID verification to see NSFW content they know hardly anyone would provide it, and at the same time it opens you up to a lot of liability in handling extremely sensitive PII.
Yes, and that is exactly why Morality in Media (the right-wing, evangelical group behind these laws) has been proposing them. Their goal is to outlaw pornography (and other "immoral" content) on the internet by making it so difficult to access or provide legally that nobody will bother.
> I'm sure most kids can figure out how to use a VPN better than adults.
You're making the mistake of assuming their goal is to prevent kids from being able to access pornography. It is not. Their goal is to make it so financially impractical to run any service that publishes (or allows people to publish) pornography, LGBTQ content, or anything that they deem "immoral" that nobody even tries. And it's working: many services which used to allow that content before 2017 no longer do, and it is much, much more expensive (and difficult) for the remaining folks to find platforms or hosting providers to continue to do so.
I was curious about the origin. It may not be what you expect.
> These bills didn’t originate from some evangelical PAC or conservative think tank. Their actual origin was, ironically, The Howard Stern Show. [0]
While it seems like everyone has overwhelmingly sided against free speech advocates (ACLU) and porn sites, there are some interesting points about access/addiction. I'm less impressed if it's purely evangelical driven (at least now), but I'm sympathetic to arguments about access for minors (or their ability to post under-age content). I don't have the answer.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-on...
> I was curious about the origin. It may not be what you expect.
As someone who's been following this for over a decade, I can assure you it is, in fact, what I expect.
That article is absolute nonsense, which you can tell by the fact that it claims the clock starts in 2021, when these bills have actually been introduced multiple times before then.
Furthermore, the article contradicts its own narrative, first claiming that a Howard Stern spot "started" it, then admitting two paragraphs later that the legislator was inspired by that radio show to contact... an anti-porn lobbyist that she had already known about for years. That's a really... interesting definition of "origin" that they're using.
Sure, but LA was the first to pass age verification for adult sites (and it wasn't until 2022-23). I don't know what the line is between that and other age verification (13+) or blanket anti-porn bills you're referring to. [0]
I don't follow your point about contradiction.
How is contacting a single-issue ally (who's on the opposite end of the political spectrum at that -- and not a "GOP Think Tank" or "evangelical") changing the origin? The person she reached out to is a pro-abortion, radical feminist. That is strengthening the article's key conclusion by a lot. It's a surprising turn for an origin story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_verification_system#United...
This seems a little baffling to me because these evangelical groups are uniquely American. There would still exist a huge pornography industry globally, particularly within the EU, that would serve the US even if these groups achieved every goal. It's deluded to think it could be stopped.
No they're not; their roots are in the YMCA and the British society for the suppression of vice and earlier societies dating back to the 1700s. They originated when the church courts were shut down and are a feature of British evangelicalism that Americans turbocharged.
> This seems a little baffling to me because these evangelical groups are uniquely American.
I'm referring to one of several groups that is behind a specific campaign in the US. That doesn't mean that there aren't other efforts to curtail this in other countries or globally.
As mentioned elsewhere, there's a law that's about to go into effect in the UK which is actually way broader and draconian than any that has been passed anywhere in the US. There are more in other countries too.
> There would still exist a huge pornography industry globally, particularly within the EU, that would serve the US even if these groups achieved every goal.
And yet, when Tumblr and Imgur and Reddit[0] banned pornography, no EU-based competitor emerged to take their place.
[0] Reddit's ban wasn't a total ban, but it was enough to effectively shut down many groups (which was the goal).
EU guys are the same. Organizations like German state police are doing "crackdowns" of Internet contents in total disregard of jurisdiction. Targeting criteria is neither consumers nor producers but specific subjective quality of content itself: they never care who makes it or at what cost, but that it exists.
Does the EU allow sales of pornography to minors?
VPNs? Or children?
>Yes, and that is exactly why Morality in Media (the right-wing, evangelical group behind these laws)
Sure, they're major culprits but let's not let the left get off the hook entirely on promoting moralizing censorship of porn too. There are segments of it, especially those in certain feminist camps that hate pornography with a victorian near-evangelical level of scorn and they have a loud voice of their own under different flags and reasoning.
Are there many and do they have any influence? I haven't heard anything from such groups. Have they gotten any laws passed, like the age verification laws the other groups have succeeded in passing in several states?
“ We believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone," Steve Jobs declared in an email to a customer. "Folks who want porn can buy an Android."
There are, but they're disorganised and poorly funded, and opposed by other feminists. (It's practically a law - for almost every feminist moral POV there is an equal and opposite feminist moral POV.)
Meanwhile the organised and well-funded evangelicals and right-wingers ignore the constant stream of SA and CP convictions among youth pastors and other supposed moral authorities.
The stats don't necessarily prove that religious states consume more porn, but porn is an existential problem for evangelicals in a way that it isn't for most progressives.
Pedantic, but the word you're looking for is proxy, not VPN.
A Virtual Private Network is a private network such as a Local Area Network created virtually on a Wide Area Network such as the internet. Tailscale, SoftEther, or Hamachi for the old boys are examples of VPN implementations.
A proxy is a server that accepts and forwards traffic from clients through it, lending its IP address to clients as the traffic origin if desired.
A proxy can exist in a private network, but it is not a requirement.
No, the word I was looking for was VPN, not proxy. We weren't having a technical discussion about protocols or what not, I was talking about the services people use to bypass state-level porn blocks, and for better or worse, those things are called VPNs. As someone who does understand the technical background, I don't really like it either, but tough shit, language changes and has different meanings in different contexts.
Just google "VPN" or "How do I access Pornhub in Alabama?" All of the results refer to "VPNs" as I was using the term.
I think this ship has sailed. Services like nord or mullad are described as VPN products yet they are the products people are buying to route traffic into pornhub.
Seeing as Hacker News is ostensibly composed largely of people in-the-know, we could certainly use appropriate terminology unlike the commons.
Usages exist inside contexts, and the context of the post you replied to was unambiguous. Changing it like s/VPNs/services advertised as VPNs/ would not clarify anything to anyone, and changing it like s/VPNs/proxies/ would be less clear (since the author was likely referring to commercial services, not servers in a network).
This is correct. This entire conversation demonstrates how bad technical people are at understanding people.
"VPN" services do in fact use VPN, they're not HTTP based. It is technically appropriate to call them as such, as awkward as it is.
A lot of people live exclusively on layer 7, which is fine.
Yeah; it's not strictly accurate, but in a similar sense that it's not strictly accurate to call the typical copper Ethernet connector "RJ45", to say that a UDP "connection" occurred, or to say that a modem connects to a "DB-9" serial port.
I suspect the root of the problem is that over time, "proxy" has become strongly associated with application-layer protocols like HTTP, and after that shift it wasn't obvious what to use for something lower-level that encompassed a wider range of protocols/endpoints/conversations. In principle, "tunnel" would probably have been better (and a legible metaphor to boot), but that's just not how things shook out in practice.
I would disagree.
First, system that forwards traffic behind its own IP address is called proxy if it works on application level, and NAT if it works on IP level. So we have socks proxy, but home router with NAT.
Second, VPN is just a fancy name for an overlay network over WAN. Overlay network is overlay network even if it only contains two nodes - your host and a remote router providing internet access.
I do not have direct experience with these VPN services, but i would guess they work on IP level and not on application level. So they are just ISPs providing service through overlay network (VPN) instead of access network or physical network.
Curious, does a proxy also tend to encrypt the data streamed between it and the end user like a VPN service would?
That is, does the ISP have access to the information that's being accessed via the proxy?
It was my understanding that proxies tending to mask where a request came from but does nothing significant with the data between it and the requester.
>does a proxy also tend to encrypt the data streamed between it and the end user like a VPN service would?
It could, but it's not a hard requirement. A proxy server is just like any other server, encrypting the data en route is as desired.
A VPN encrypts data as a part of securing tunnels, but it's not a hard requirement there either. As long as two computers can communicate over private IP address ranges on a WAN, it's a VPN. The Private in VPN indicates the scope of the network, not whether any data within is immediately accessible.
See also: "Private" and "Public" IP address ranges.
>does the ISP have access to the information that's being accessed via the proxy?
The ISP providing internet to the proxy server will know what the proxy server requests and receives.
>It was my understanding that proxies tending to mask where a request came from but does nothing significant with the data between it and the requester.
Correct. Again, whether the data a proxy server receives and forwards was encrypted is tangential to the task of forwarding data.
Depends on the proxy. If you have an SSH server you can open a local socks5 proxy, that when configured in your browser sends all the traffic through your server. Since its a proxy over SSH it's all encrypted till your server, then whatever protocol the website uses.
VPNs are better (as in more ergonomic) in practice, since large sites tend to block access from known hosting providers (looking at YouTube not rendering video when accessed from a Hetzner server).
It's 100% bullshit. The parents themselves are responsible for letting their children browse the internet unsupervised.
The culture of over-reaction to danger that has taken over the political domain is creating a nanny state where it's impossible to avoid crosssing red lines and doing something wrong. It's paralyzing society by instilling inaction as the only safe path.
> The parents themselves are responsible
Parents give their kids access to guns and we all know how that ends. If we can't hold parents accountable for their children's violence, I seriously doubt we can do anything about parents failing to parent their kids on this topic.
What are we going to do? throw the single mom with 2 jobs and 5 kids in jail because she didn't pay $20/mo for parental controls on her kids devices?
>throw the single mom with 2 jobs and 5 kids in jail because she didn't pay $20/mo for parental controls on her kids devices?
If she wants to have children out of wedlock or with a man who are not financially capable of being a provider, then she and her children should bear the consequences of that, not everyone else who know has to have government take over the internet and mandates identity disclosures for perusing adult content.
Society pays the consequences either directly from government or the impact the kids have on everyone else that has to live with adults that discovered porn as a kid before they could understand it.
Kids that discovered porn at an early age will not understand how to process it properly and this will impact their relationships in the future. It is their future partners that suffer along with the kids and family.
If that's really the case, the only person who should be punished is the parent. Everyone else should not be punished with a more restricted society.
How do you punish the parent without punishing the kid? Throw the single mom in jail? fine her? take the kid away?
If the kid is living with single-income grandma, b/c parents passed. Do we throw grandma in jail for not blocking the content properly?
> The parents themselves are responsible for letting their children browse the internet unsupervised.
Unless you never let your child near any slightly older child with a phone, you as a parent cannot individually control this.
> The culture of over-reaction to danger
Which is it? Is it that parents haven't protected their children enough, or that children don't need protection from watching pornography?
>Unless you never let your child near any slightly older child with a phone, you as a parent cannot individually control this.
You have to not let your child near any older child with a non-child-safe phone. This is the parents' responsibility.
>Unless you never let your child near any slightly older child with a phone, you as a parent cannot individually control this.
...are you implying kids are having group jerkoff / porn sessions? Seems like a pretty absurd claim.
Also, on your second point, you seem to be almost strawmanning -- I see no claim from the person you're replying to that they think kids need more protection.
They're stating that parents are actively giving their kids devices, and have a lot of tools to restrict usage of those devices. Whether they literally limit physical access, oversee use, or install filtering software, there's a lot that can be done to restrict access in an authoritarian manner to those kids, and exclusively within the household without having to affect and restrict the overwhelming majority of society: grown adults.
(I also personally believe education is more important than any sort of restriction, and am always against censorship or surveillance policies in general. I definitely agree with them on but I'm trying to mostly restrict my post to what that person almost definitely had in mind, rather than soapboxing my own views).
> > Unless you never let your child near any slightly older child with a phone, you as a parent cannot individually control this.
> ...are you implying kids are having group jerkoff / porn sessions? Seems like a pretty absurd claim.
Pre-internet, there was a fairly common trope of a kid discovering a dirty magazine, often hidden in the home by an older sibling, and showing it to their friends. Nothing actually happening, they were just sharing the images. GP seemed to just be suggesting that updated for the internet age.
> ...are you implying kids are having group jerkoff / porn sessions? Seems like a pretty absurd claim.
Just anything. Beheading videos. Whatever. I can't imagine anyone not realising this is a virtual certainty for some older kids to show younger kids.
> I see no claim from the person you're replying to that they think kids need more protection.
They called it "danger".
> there's a lot that can be done to restrict access in an authoritarian manner to those kids
But not to their kids' friends' older siblings. If you're not talking about that then I don't think you're particularly replying to my comment.
> I also personally believe education is more important than any sort of restriction, and am always against censorship or surveillance policies in general.
I think in this case this fights against the idea that some concepts or experiences are not appropriate for certain ages, and some of them are not currently curatable by parents in a way that they always have been throughout history.
Unfiltered twitter is significantly less NSFW, just as a point of feedback. Good luck with you project tho
You probably shouldn’t show NSFW to non-logged in users.
Otherwise you could run afoul of various laws, since technically minors can access it
I will add a tagging system and hide nsfw posts from non-logged-in non-opted-in users this weekend.
Serious question: Is my browser blocking image content or something?
Or is there general consensus that plain body-font sized text is also an NSFW concern?
I didn’t see any non-text content, but I didn’t spend that much time looking.
NSFW text is a thing, there are porn sites that house explicit text for zoophilia, pedophilia, incest, rape, etc. I’m not saying this site has anything extreme or out there, but there are likely laws governing what text can be shown, it’s simpler to just require login, since that will also help protect you against COPPA and other restrictions for minors that are non NSFW related.
I’m all for free speech, but there are laws governing how certain text is handled
> there are laws governing how certain text is handled
Is that true?? In the US?
My instinctive metric[0] for NSFW is: Could a casual passerby see something that falls into a class of designated offensivenesses (e.g. sex of any kind, but not violence unless it's also sexual)?
Text in a giant font could certainly qualify. But I would not think that ordinary-sized body text would be problematic -- if the passerby has to pause and snoop, they are breaking other equally-important protocols to ascertain SFW or lack thereof.
0: I have not run this by an HR department, and I've worked from a home office for more than twenty years, so I may know nothing of which I speak!
A better metric might be “could a casual network filtering program pick up something that would be forbidden at work”.
Wouldn't such a network filter also trigger on random (in the sense of unpredictable to the reader) pages here on HN though? Or Reddit, etc?
I've never lived under such a regime, but all of the trigger words I can imagine at OP's site are also present in generally-SFW discussion forums.
Yeah but the IT bod looking into it would see the rest of the site as context
If they check on a site and it's heavy on the NSFW maybe things get looked into with a bit more of a "... is this person browsing porn at work?" attitude
Good point. I have never suffered such indignity, but I forget my privilege.
This is 100% the correct answer. It’s unfortunate nsfw was framed as a political question.
It's probably hard to reach a consensus when every workplace is different. However, sexually explicit text would be inappropriate at most places I've worked.
There are image links to NSFW content
All you need to sidestep those laws is a little prompt that asks you if you're 18, you don't need to require a login. Unless you're talking about recent US laws.
[flagged]
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We've had to ask you this more than once before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Answering to a person who calls topics related to trans people not safe for children is now regarded as starting a flamewar (whatever this means), nice.
No, "Minors can't learn of trans people? What other people should they be warned of, Jews?" is starting a flamewar. This is not a borderline call.
I think it's pretty clear what "the flamewar style" means to anyone who's been around internet forums for a little while, but if you want a definition, it could be somewhere in the neighborhood of: conversation that's focused on aggressive/snarky/indignant expression for the purpose of venting and/or defeating opponents, as opposed to curious, respectful conversation for the purpose of learning from each other. These two are mutually exclusive, and on this site we want the latter, not the former. Your GP comment was the former, as for that matter was your reply to me here.
Respectful conversation involves sarcasm and satire. I hope we are not in church to avoid using those. I wasn't using aggression against the person I was replying to and my comment was pretty calm, was it? What is really flamewary and pretty rude to say is stating that trans people need an NSFW tag. If you so much want to avoid flamewars, whatever this means, you probably should have replied to that person in the first place.
> Respectful conversation involves sarcasm and satire
It can in some contexts! For example with friends or close colleagues, or a small group of familiars. But the context is the dominant variable.
In a context like HN (a large, public, optionally anonymous internet forum), sarcasm and satire and snark are likely to come across as cheap attacks. The odds of that are so high that such messages should either be avoided or disambiguated enough that the median reader—someone who doesn't know you or anything about you—can still detect that you're conversing respectfully.
This sucks a bit—it means we're all subject to a certain blandness here. But the alternative is the war of all against all, followed by scorched earth, and that isn't much of a choice.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's hard to discern whether you're misreading this whole thread on purpose or not. Nobody is claiming that trans content in general is NSFW, but that a certain subset of content therein, displayed openly on the site is -- which OP evidently agrees with. If you think OP is anti-trans, I don't know who you think is pro-.
Trans people aren’t NSFW, please reread what I said.
I said the NSFW text content. Not trans people.
I’m talking about NSFW posts, not a blanket statement about trans people.
I would urge you to reread my post.
honestly I think people just need to grow up. so many people get outraged and cry "this should be NSFW!" when it is literally just a naked human body. we are so prudish in our society.
Not everyone share that view, and that’s OK.
[flagged]
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yikes - I didn't think my comment was especially critical at all, just a kind of funny way to explore the issue. It's a sincere question. But I apparently am not imagining what it looks like. Sorry!
I am very concerned about this being a target for malicious actors. I'd offer to help you with security but I've never even heard of some of your stack so I'm probably not in a position to help.
Is there anyone here who is familiar with OP's stack and has security experience?
This is exactly what I thought about when I first read the post. This is not a good idea in my opinion.
I disagree -- this is a good idea, because trans people need a community especially in times like this.
It just needs some attention paid to security.
How is it a bad idea? A community for trans people that's actively used by them because it works for their needs should be considered a bad idea because certain assholes can attack it? The bad there is in the assholes and effort is due in stopping them, not the existence for a specific type of useful community itself.
It's a bad idea when countries like mine are actively passing legislation toward banning trans people from existing. Having a hackable dox-ready list of where to find them and who they are would be quite convenient for any regime or its fervent supporters that have the resources and skill to weaponize such a service against them.
I get what you're saying, the assholes are the bad thing here...but they are also a clear and present danger that now has the power to do what they said they would do these people. This isn't just some malicious hate group from 4chan or whatever, these are government-backed actors interested in actually harming these individuals.
You're talking as if these threats are new to us. They're not. America is not the world, and treatment of trans people wasn't great in America prior to the current administration, either. I don't see a reason to disband our communities because the trans hate is slightly more front-and-center than it was a few years ago. They are needed now more than ever.
This can work if the platform instills a culture of pseudonymity and takes privacy seriously. There exist platforms on the darkweb where far more sensitive data is exchanged.
I believe that you are fully right, but your concerns can be mitigated.
It's bad if the attack involves, say, doxing the users (who may not desire this or be in a place where it is safe fort this to happen).
If you've created a service with that many users, that could be a target for malicious actors, and also hosts NSFW content, you may want to look over this article and protect yourself by forming an LLC.
https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html
LLCs won't protect you completely. That's a myth.
Parent didn't say anything about complete protection? An LLC does offer some level of protection, albeit mostly liability protection (as implied by the name, Limited Liability Company), and in this case I would be more worried about the need to defend against overzealous law enforcement requests. I'm not sure an LLC really helps much in that context. It's more about being able to afford a good legal team.
For what they're referring to, there is no personal protection. You can be personally liable for neglecting to protect against illegal sexual content even through an LLC.
This is what keeps most people from hosting user content. It's very easy to do, but it opens you to massive personal liabilities.
Thanks!
If you have time for a web interface, that would probably give some folks a better sense of security.
Saw a post that says they found the website via the "terrible orange site"?! Grumble grumble. /jk
In all seriousness though, this is great! And good timing too, such a community is needed now more than ever before. Does this website cater to otherkins too, or is that a separate concern (which is completely ok too)?
About the funding: are you basically just using lightweight services to keep the cost down, while paying for it out of pocket or with donations? Is there a contingency plan if -- touch wood -- you go rogue or shut down the app?
As someone who isn't familiar with the norms of this community, the first few posts were somewhat surprising. I mean to say, they were overtly sexual and public. I have many trans friends and gay friends so I'm not saying I've never heard terminology like that, but it was usually in a closed conversation. I wonder if those are spam comments? It would be interesting to hear how you plan to guard against people who will probably see this as a good place to hunt for vulnerable people. I'm interested because I thought this might be a good place to help find ways to support my friends in an awful time. But I am not sure I would want to participate in the community just given the first few posts I saw.
As a little bit of context, a lot of trans people (rightfully) view HN as a (white)-male dominated place, and feel misunderstood and misheard by the people here. A common defense tactic is to become _more_ sexually overt and grotesque than they actually are in reality.
A lot of the other thirstposting is, from my experience, very much genuine and heartfelt.
The trans community is often quite open.
I'm personally transgender, monogamous and mostly lesbian, so I'm a bit of a "boring" outlier when it comes to the poly & kink communities. But I spend a LOT of time in trans spaces. Online and offline. Professionally and casually. Younger and older. Political and friendly.
Etc
Idt it's defensive, at least not for my trans friends. I'm a gay dude and I think it's just that the queer community is a lot more open about that stuff in general, which contrasts greatly with straight people, especially Americans.
I just love this, thanks. A good reminder.
Nothing wrong with NSFW content per se, but you cannot justify potentially exposing children to pornographic content as a "coping mechanism", it wouldn't be accepted by any court for sure.
I completely agree.
There’s a fine line between ‘open’ and ‘perverted’.
Perverted is just some other person being judgmental.
That line is shared with the one of "none of your business"
Yep. That's why I'm openly talking about moderation and why I'm very much in favor of an NSFW filter.
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> And I (rightfully) view congregations of transgender women mostly as a (white)-male dominated place.
You need to get out in the world more, that's a very limited locale specific PoV.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336597435/figure/fi...
68% seems 'mostly'.
As does this map: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/trans-pop...
/ˈməʊs(t)li/ adverb as regards the greater part or number.
With no response I'll assume you've worked out for yourself why your graphs and statistics are bad data.
If not, I'm happy to walk you through some of it - it'd impress more if you can come back with a global average figure for transgenderism and some thoughts on why (for example) Indonesia has such a large population and yet such low official figures (43K IIRC rather than >> 3 million).
Forget the transgender part and think of this as a data exercise.
You need to get out in the world more and experience reality outside of the US and US centric 'world' maps.
The "worldpopulationreview" data has shortcomings. An obvious (for any with a background in data collection) reporting bias for one ..
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I don’t think the thirst posts are trolls, but I do know what you mean. One of my top priorities this next month is adding NSFW filtering to the app to allow people to toggle that sort of content on and off.
I'm glad that you're making it a toggle and not banning it outright. This is my biggest gripe with BlueSky at the moment.
Isn't BlueSky doing the exact thing you want: making it a toggle?
By the way this isn't a snarky rhetorical question. I wonder whether people do experience censorship more than the built-in preference filters on BlueSky.
For one thing, BlueSky blocks NSFW images from being embedded in RSS feeds, so I have to use third-party services like https://bluestream.deno.dev/ to generate RSS feeds which embed images in my RSS reader.
I'm not sure what you mean?
On Bluesky they just apply a label and users are free to toggle it as show/warn/hide. At least, this is what I've personally experienced using the site.
Most communities act differently when it's just themselves in a space they own, as compared to when they're in a space that is less homogenous. The queer scene is a lot more open with sexuality than the cishet one.
Even (cis) men have "locker room talk," things you wouldn't say when around most women.
well... some cis men do. certainly not all.
> Even (cis) men have "locker room talk," things you wouldn't say when around most women.
Dunno, if you can't say it around women, at all ever, then it probably doesn't hold up to scrutiny. I'd say you share raunchy stuff with people you know to not have a problem with it, and depending on what it is that might be your guy friends more often, sure. But I know men who are way more stuck up than some women I know, not even a contest. If I was in a big group of guys and there was the expressed or implied statement of "okay, since we're amongst heterosexual men only now, we can say certain things we normally can't say" I would just get out.
That's not a statement on the site OP posted, I just disagree that cis men say stuff amongst themselves they wouldn't around women, while homosexual or bisexual men would never do that. There's bigots and people who can actually own what they say anywhere, no group is purely saint or evil.
> I just disagree that cis men say stuff amongst themselves they wouldn't around women, while homosexual or bisexual men would never do that.
Nothing they said implied the 2nd part even slightly. And not because most homosexual and bisexual men are cis.
Same difference. What makes non-cis men special that they required specific exclusion from that sentence?
Sorry for any confusion - the parenthetical (cis) was meant to narrow my statement according to my specific first-hand experiences, not to imply that trans men don't do it. I can see how my wording implied that, though.
The trans community doesn't want to admit it but they very much identify themselves by their sexuality/orientation which is very weird to outsiders
I think many people in “out groups” identify with that aspect. Like I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about me being human - but if I was abducted by aliens into their society I probably would identify as human a lot more.
About as weird as identifying yourself by which variant of sport you watch, I guess.
As a super straight CIS guy who worships Wendy Carlos and Selofan, I wish I could join too. I am sure ya'll talk about the coolest things.
It just makes me sad how before the internet there really were not these barriers. The "freaks" of society all got together around art, music, fashion in an apolitical way.
This ultimately is the opposite of "inclusive" but I get why. It still makes me sad.
I like the minimalist design! And it’s fast to load too. Good job
Thank you!
Last year I managed to connect with 10 other trans people in my Lancashire home town. This is a place with zero 'alternative' spaces, let alone dedicated queer spaces. I made a poster using the trans pride flag as the background, and wrote a bit of blurb on it and put an email address on. Then I stuck it up on community notice boards in supermarkets and in a pub window. My idea was that if you put these things in high footfall areas, someone is bound to walk past and get in touch. And they did! Plus, more pride flags being visible, especially if they are coming from the grassroots and not a giant company, shows that we are here and not alone, and makes us feel safer. So if you want to connect with people near you, maybe go analog and put up some posters ^__^
This would be too risky IMHO ie in eastern Europe (I don't mean sh*thole of russia where this is even much worse, just eastern EU).
The general attitude is less tolerant. Most people in general population of course have 'live and let live' attitude, but small part of each country does actively attack such people, ie skinheads or other far right groups.
This is exactly why it's important to find each other, so we can keep each other safe. There is strength in numbers. If you put up your posters on community notice board and use a non-personal email (I just made a new Gmail account for it) then nobody can be identified, the worst case is someone pulls the poster down.
Seems fishy to require an app. BigCorp normally does this so they can skim off more user data and prevent ad blocking.
As a trans woman I gave it a go. I find the interface a little confusing and unappealing but the featureset for profiles is actually what I'd be looking for.
non content related feedback
I like how minimalist the UI is, but I might want a little bit of padding on the sides? I feel like HN does that part pretty well even though it's a little more decorated than this.
Also it wasn't obvious to me that the website is sort of a "preview" of the front page and the app is the main platform, i'll have to check that part out too.
Thank you for the feedback. As a design decision I did want to completely forego landing pages and upsells, both the sites and the app just "drop you in". I could probably make it a bit more clear without losing the minimalism of the page though that the real experience is in the app, not on the site.
The site serves mostly to allow people to share public posts and profiles from the app.
> A year ago I surveyed the internet and noticed there was only one popular space for trans and gender-non-conforming people to meet
How is that possible? On the infinite Internet, where there is online space for much smaller communities, how can there not be far more - on Reddit, Discords, FB, IG, other platforms, phpBB, etc etc.
I should have been more specific - I meant a popular platform
Not a huge fan of lack of control over location in profile. I understand wanting location to show local posts much like lex, but right now all I can disable on my profile is "showing neighbourhood".
The app grabs three locales of differing specificity, which I guess you think is Neighbourhood -> City -> Country. However what it has fetched as my Neighbourhood is my "Ward" which is a suburb subdivision in Australia that is never used for anything except for voting in local council elections. This is a truly overly specific location, 80% of people will have no idea what their ward is until they look at their voting paper for the council elections. The next most specific locale "City" is my suburb, which is also a relatively small location which I'm not comfortable sharing online. If it grabbed my metro city (i.e. Melbourne) I'd be happy to display that. Overall though, I think this should be an editable field so that people can share as comfortable. I'm fine that the app needs my location but why does that need to be displayed to other users?
people are criticizing the minimal text interface, but i really appreciate it.
it's very nice in w3m, a tui browser. but spacing between each post (none), and among posts and their metadata (one line) needs some tuning, because it clusters each timestamp footer with the user header for the next post. i would suggest avoiding `<li>` for feed items and use more general-purpose elements.
is there a reason you're not simply hosting a mastodon instance?
Mastodon isn’t particularly good for monetization.
Beware if you have UK users, you should read the new law in the UK called the online safety act.
Your site has young trans people, sexual content, and would also be a target for grooming from chasers. The risks, for you, are very high.
> The risks, for you, are very high.
Is the creator in the UK? Or do they visit regularly? It wasn't mentioned in the original post.
The law has ridiculous overreach, that's true. And we haven't seen what international enforcement of it looks like yet. But to deal with the facts as they are now, the law states that it applies if you have UK users, and that the personal liability for officers of the company can be up to £18M... The overreach continues because it also covers "harmful but not illegal" content.
The app publishing didn't exclude the UK, it probably should.
No, the law cannot possibly apply "if you have UK users".
The law applies if you're in the UK or in a country the UK can persuade to extradite you.
I don't agree with the law, there's no point in using emphasis to labour the point, the UK Govt advice on who it applies to is here https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act... and feel free to read it. As to enforcement, it's a new law so there has been none, hence no-one can speak to that, but you're right that extradition is the path and on that front if a similar law exists and agreements are in place, then for example most European countries would extradite. We don't know where the author is, but they posted on here in the morning of European time zones, and all I suggested is that they do their diligence on their personal risk as a result of laws that do claim to apply their service. No-one should dismiss the risk, the person should speak to a lawyer.
What’s wrong with Grindr, the biggest app for queer and trans people to meet?
I think the main complaints overall with apps like Grindr, Lex et al comes in a few parts:
1) Mainstream dating apps are full of very profit driven patterns, and feel manipulative and corporate. A fair followup would be why would t4t not eventually become like this? I think probably the main differentiator is that t4t is written to run extremely cheap, and my goals for it are mostly just for it to support me financially. I have gotten quite far as a single person team, and currently I am using something like 2% of the processing power within my payment tier on Supabase. There is huge growth potential with little cost increase.
2) Probably the bigger issue is that there is a generational divide between "old queers" and "young queers", and the divide does seem to fall largely on trans comfort. Many older gays feel like their space is invaded, and many younger ones feel discriminated against. I think this pattern plays out regardless of gender. It is helpful to set intentions from the start, and so the intentions of this app from the start are to be most friendly to the "new school" way of seeing things.
3) Finally, these apps are all pretty explicitly sexualized. I know that might sound funny given how sexual the app I created can get, but I am not really pushing that. This is just a free and open community space nothing more. You can use it for whatever you like. You can date on it but you can also just share hot takes and thoughts.
OP, I love your passion, but as someone who's been in these trenches for a long time as a visibily queer person, you are a Titanic heading for an iceberg of legal issues in the US, UK,and a few other places. You are putting yourself and your users at an extremely high risk of outing, doxing, and potential legal issues. The fact that you haven't addressed these issues scares me and it should scare you.
You are going to need content moderation, and you are going to need it quick as you scale.
This is the one thing that doesn’t scale. There’s a bunch of T&S advice and best practices out there.
Get a press kit ready. Be clear on what is and isn’t allowed.
In the EU, you would need to be able to provide access to appeals if you cross a certain size (VLOPs).
I mention this because you are a 1 person team.
My personal experience as a trans woman? The space is full of men who want to have sex with trans women, while most of these trans women are interested only in people similar to themselves. IE, queer, non binary, trans.
And you get spammed dickpicks by the hundreds. Even if you explicitly say "I DON'T WANT DICKPICKS AND I WILL REPORT YOU IF YOU SEND ME A DICKPICK" and then you receive a dickpick? And point to the report thing?
You get sent another dickpick by the same person at a different angle.
Happens to me almost daily.
Almost nothing I do works. No moderation settings, no report features, no profile texts.
Grindr is best for gay men and bi men. Trans women, trans men and non binary people are not treated as first-class citizens by the values they care for the most.
> most of these trans women are interested only in people similar to themselves. IE, queer, non binary, trans
That sounds kind of odd to me. I don’t have any experience or insight to people’s experiences here but I would assume that most trans people are trans because they want to be the opposite sex, not because they want to be trans specifically. This statement here suggests they’re identifying as trans more so than the gender they’re transitioning to.
Where am I mistaken?
This is talking about sexuality, not gender identity. Who you want to have sex with is not determined by your sex or gender. It is correlated, but not determined (as in more cis men are bi and straight than gay, thus a random man is more likely to be bi or straight than gay).
In this case, she's talking about her preferences which can be any identity, sex etc.
For example, a trans person may prefer to date other trans people because they will have more common experiences and there will be less explaining if how things work on their body etc. Others might have preferences based on primary or secondary sex characteristics. Others may only date people who like a specific type of cheese.
An individual person can do whatever they want.
It sounds surprising to me that trans people broadly prefer trans people is all.
As a queer person who hasn't used Grindr but has heard about it from others, my understanding is that it has a reputation for being more for hookups than actual dating. Heard a story about a gay male friend-of-a-friend setting up an account on it and getting 4 unsolicited dick pics within a very short period of time.
Obviously this is just secondhand anecdotal evidence—I'm sure someone who has personally used the app could chime in and correct me if I am wrong.
Extremely correct.
can unfortunatenly confirm
I... am not sure if this is a joke or not. Grindr is not a community or posting tool. It's a hookup app.
That used to be true but Grindr has pivoted and now advertises itself as a 2SLGBTQIA+ community app
"Grindr advertises itself as community app" is about as meaningful as "Fast Food advertises itself as healthy" :)
(Also, for those who were confused by 2S - "Two-spirit". That one's new to me in terms of adding it to the acronym list)
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"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Perhaps I and my fox want to "belong" in general (to the community of life on earth) but they don't want to take on other people's baggage (belong to a community that excludes participation in other communities)
> "Cultural appropriation" is a fancy way to say "I only want to learn from people just like me".
Cultural appropriation is learning about things only from people like you, not from the people outside your culture who created it and who may have jarring perspectives and expressions of them.
For example - just something I recently saw - lots of 1950s-60s rock musicians like Elvis and the Rolling Stones appropriated music from black musicians and cashed in on it with legions of white teens. The teens never heard the original musicians or music; they got sanitized, safe, and familiar forms of it - they never encountered much of the original culture or heard from the original people. Apparently some RS performances were note-for-note, vocal-riff-for-vocal-riff copies. (To be fair, the RS apparently often toured with some of the original musicians as opening acts.)
exactly! to the point that that music is now synonmous with Elvis and the original culture is lost.
I dont even think 'Cultural Appropriation' describes like, what we ought to do about that in any specific terms. maybe nothing. it more just identifies a problem
"To be fair, the RS apparently often toured with some of the original musicians as opening acts"
What more would you like? These notes have been played this way before, therefor no other group will ever play them again?
Yes, the exploitation of other (especially minority) cultures is an issue. And that's very much not how "cultural appropriation" is used any more - it's very specifically used as "this belongs to that other group, nobody else can have it". And thus precludes any learning.
It is, in its common use, asking for fully siloed cultures. I don't think humanity benefits from those siloes.
For people who are really interested: A big part of the problem is that the black blues musicians were excluded - they were kept out of the mainstream, which created opportunity for people like the RS to cash in on the black artists' music.
For example, imagine if today people of East and South Asian descent were excluded from SV. Then white developers stole their ideas and code, changed a few things and put their own name on it, and cashed in.
Art has many more cultural consequences than for-profit software, of course.
Maybe that's how its used now, but it was never the intent, and plenty of people still mean it in the original sense
> it's very specifically used as "this belongs to that other group, nobody else can have it". And thus precludes any learning.
Nonsense. Whoever told you that was projecting.
Nothing precludes respectful collaboration and learning, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHgdrzgtBik and numerous other examples.
Worthy of note here is the Rolling Stones learnt about US "black music" from UK record stores, many run by former post WWII US servicemen who preferred the UK to the US South and Jamacian and Trinidadian musicians from the former British slave colonies.
They attended "black" clubs and jammed with black musicians .. they had an experience uncommon in US.
Cultural Appropriation is super often misused (as it was in this case), but does describe a real thing.
Just like how people complain that 'crypto' now only means cryptocurrency, or people complain that the new star wars movies 'killed their childhood' etc, having something that you have a strong connection to have its meaning distorted sucks.
Imagine if seeing a holy cross, the first thing you thought of wasn't the religious meaning but that it was the logo for some company.
One of many terms that got taken way out of context and abused by lots of people, some with good intentions and some not
>Imagine if seeing a holy cross, the first thing you thought of wasn't the religious meaning but that it was the logo for some company.
It is; they're just tax exempt and have their own country.
Is this a joke (I'm asking in seriousness)? Don't matter how they "advertise themselves", it's a hookup app. There aren't even any features (like forums or public postings) that would be necessary to call themselves a "community app".
In a sense it is almost an anti-community tool, I've heard it being partly to blame for the decline in business at some bars.
Grindr got bought by str8 tech Bros and is now heavily profit driven.
Plus as a gay dude I don't even really use it bc it's just a vain wall of abs and conversations about the most inane meaningless things on there.
There aren't even really that many actual geeks in the "geek" tribe. Just pretty dudes who think they're a geek bc they play fifa on their xbox.
The icon is not religious-parent-safe. Why not offer other icons?
The app seems to be marked 17+ on the App Store, which means it may have “Infrequent/mild sexual content”.
The very first entry on the recent posts list is:
“tell us about your cum!”
I think you need to make a choice between being strictly adults-only and strictly SFW-only. If you allow under 18s and show them that kind of content, there will be headlines.
Reddit seems to do fine with mixed content. Just need to have good controls for it in app imo.
Reddit has absolutely massive amounts of free moderation being done every day, and users are constantly being split into smaller groups to handle scale and nuance.
The admin team sits on top of that. And they have access to NCMEC along with full fledged data science teams.
Reddit is VC funded.
Reddit changes behavior depending on signup path, and is also aggressive with admin deletions, but hides acts well. It's in perception only that Reddit still has everything dirty in the open.
Reddit gets very thorough scrutiny from the App Store review team. They have policies on it.
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Warning for those who visit the site at work, there is a lot of NSFW content.
(I work in social media content moderation.)
Echoing some other comments here, I highly recommend (in strongest possible terms) that you sit down with a lawyer well versed in Internet law wherever you are based out of and lay all of this out on the table for them.
All it takes is a bored official finding this thread or your site directly and your sincere effort here will transform into some kind of nightmare. Particularly given some of the major political swings recently, you have a target on your back and no megacorp legal team to protect you.
It is crazy easy to end up hosting an image known to NCMEC as seriously bad news and have no idea. Or NCII and not have an adequate reporting/actioning mechanism. Or someone tosses your user DB and people get harassed, swatted, or worse.
Not to mention you yourself are a target. By working on your passion project you've definitely already crossed lines that put you at physical risk if your info gets out. And over time the chance that it will climbs toward certainty.
I don't mean to dissuade you or wrap subtext in plausible corpolegal BS. I do mean, one human being to another, that you aren't merely building a fun community for people, you've also entered a field where very real, very heavy consequences--legal or not--now need to be a core part of your daily risk calculus.
Yes, huge +1 to this OP, especially if you're American bc you are heading for a big collision with FOSTA-SESTA and other legal issues that could put you and your users at risk of harm.
Someone should set up a website with nothing but LLM generated content, to troll these officials.
GP mentioned NCMEC, those guys don't care if it's generated or not. Anything aligns their preference gets labeled as "nonconsensual child pornography" and they come after your hosting, DNS, payment, visas, so on. Consensus or IRL children aren't their concerns.
Well LLMs don't generate their precious blackmail material so there's no legal reason to hand anything over.
Ultimately they'll flashbang you on a Sunday morning, put you on a no-fly list, and circulate warrants, at least until you add heavy geoblocking and start framing them right so they'll be the socially awkward side. They won't ask you for a list of clientele, they can look that up, they're after contents.
this administration in particular has made it a priority to make examples of trans people and use them for political points. make sure you have ALL your legal ducks in a row if you're going to run something like this.
I've been disappointed to not encounter the hot trans girl content the comments are complaining about.
How do you handle iOS testing? Do you have VPN blocking? What are some guerilla marketing tactics did you use? I am trying to grow a community in an unrelated topic and want to see what I could potentially do.
Cool project by the way!
There are also a number of high-user trans-specific and 2SLGBTQI+ Discord servers with varying degrees of activity (although the more fun ones tend to be private and you need to get an invite from a public server)
You can find some on Disboard or in Discord's recent server search facility.
Anecdotally I never found Disboard servers to be of quality (as of 2 yrs ago). The low user count servers were more engaging but there were not a lot of good ones on Disboard.
I tried making a web crawler that found invite links in common crawl data to find more authentic low user count servers. There was something off about servers that self-selected by taking the time and effort in adding the Disboard bot. The crawler actually worked well. I had about 10k online servers before I stopped and a handful of low user count servers in my niches. Made a few friends in these but none of them stuck long-term.
So far I'm back to just a few private servers I'm active in. 50% from IRL connections, 50% from online friend connections. I struggle so much to find new spaces or to make my current ones work better for me
The low contrast in the app makes it distractingly uncomfortable to read.
> NSFW should be opt-in, not default.
> How do people report offensive, doxing and unsafe content? Do you have moderators, and can they scale if it comes lot more popular?
> Why not also people to browse the web version? It can be a lot easier for accessibility. I sometimes need a bigger font than what the default is. Adjusting it on the mobile is ok but the screen is tiny so there is all manner of scrolling in all directions to read the content.
Cool app, I'll give it a try. Thanks for sharing, and I definitely appreciate feeling the need for an alternative to Lex (which is sad! they took VC money then had to hypergrowth or die, my prediction is that it will be the latter tbh).
If they would've kept super lean and focused on a sustainable business model, they could've been a pretty big success
it looks really slick but the timeline scrolling is a little heavy.
also fwiw no way to filter location for posts without sharing your own...
I am curious if you mean heavy in terms of the physics of the swipe, or heavy in terms of something like the layout?
Either HN suddenly became far more constructive and considerate, and on an inflammatory topic, or dang is doing an incredible job moderating this discussion. I'll just hazard a guess and say - thank you dang!
But dang - please don't let this off-topic comment sit at the top of the page and distract from t4t's post.
If you turn on "show dead", there's an unusually large and alarming number of dead replies on this ranging from fairly banal flame baiting to outright bigotry and slurs. That alone probably shows the value in having these kinds of dedicated niche community sites.
Unfortunately I think it's more a function of forum size than topic. I say 'unfortunately' because there's a nasty feedback loop of site-being-good -> site-getting-bigger -> site-attracting-badness -> site-getting-worse.
Sometimes I describe this as "there's a cap on how good HN can ever get", but HN is just a placeholder there for any forum of comparable size.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Are you actually the only mod? I'm shocked at how you seem to show up in every other thread, even cases like this where you're replying to a comment that itself was probably not flagged (and thus put on your queue).
I'm not the only mod, just the only one who writes about it publicly.
He's an interdimensional being who exists outside of time, like Palmer Eldritch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_E...
> unusually large and alarming number of dead replies
If you search previous discussions on this site that in any way touch on lgbt/trans topic in the slightest, you will find it is not unusual at all. The only surprising thing about this post is that it somehow wasn't immediately flagged/removed from front page.
Is there a way to sign up without using Google/Apple sign-in?
Such an interesting and so minimal! Gonna check it out after work. Nice job!
Not sure if mentioned.
But add some encryption, and some way to identify bad actors.
With the recent executive orders, it might become dangerous to be trans. Yes, it has always been dangerous. But now more like 'the purge' type dangerous with roving gangs with dogs chasing trans people through the country side.
I'd think trans people would be in 'hide' mode.
Generally, I wonder if anybody not a maga brown shirt, is in 'hide' mode.
So trans people, it is no longer about 'being true to self', and now is 'i better hide to survive'.
Suddenly feeling how the 'chill' of retribution is stifling all discourse. There is real fear.
So generally, the app should be more on the 'hide'/anonymous features. How can I connect to others like me, in an environment where we are both being hunted.
> But now more like 'the purge' type dangerous with roving gangs with dogs chasing trans people through the country side.
Do you honestly believe anything like this is going to happen?
It hopefully won't come to that but things are starting to get pretty scary. It's slowly becoming illegal to be trans. I have friends that moved away from Florida because it's effectively illegal to get hormone therapy for adults. I'm generally perceived as a woman and have weird men hit on me or even follow me home and there are states where I could go to jail if I use the women's room. This hasn't happened yet but some red states are trying to make it illegal for me to wear women's clothing. Most of the trans women I know have been threatened or harassed on public. I live in CA and have had this happen to me multiple times.
I don't think there will be a formal government purge but I'd bet money that we'll see an uptick in random violence directed at us in the next 4 years.
Maybe not 'official' purge.
more like nazi brow shirts.
Generally harassing's a population while government officials turn a blind eye.
Good Luck.
Maybe we'll meet on the underground railroad transporting trans to Canada.
Would normally not think it would come to that.
But a lot that would never happen has happened in last 2 days.
stay safe, much love.
They used to do it with black people, still do it but used to too.
Probably not roving gangs but targeted attacks, which have happened. The current political climate and people in charge are going to get plenty of people dead.
Yes.
They are already being fired.
They are told they don't exist.
(imagine telling a redhead that they are fake and then firing them).
Changing how they dress in order to hide.
They were singled out as a group to isolate and torment by the ruling government.
How many steps do you need to see a trajectory.
I don't know. Why don't you ask Matthew Sheppard or Brandon Teena?
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You've been breaking the site guidelines so badly in so many places that I've banned the account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42768447
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42768431
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42768394
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42609403
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> It has grown in the last year to about 4,000 monthly active users. I think it could grow way beyond that this year.
Is it really a good idea to paint a bullseye on this group in the US right now?
How is creating or operating a community “painting a bullseye” ?
And tbh now more than ever I think it’s important for communities like this to exist.
Interpreting Animats' question as concern for the user population, I think it's a valid one.
The new administration in the US is openly hostile, and a lot of damage could be done to peoples' lives if, say, the community was hacked and private email addresses (or other PII) was leaked.
And I also agree with you -- now's the time for those of us who can afford it, to fly our ally flags as loudly and proudly as possible.
OP: Please make sure your secure coding and operational security practices are excellent and meet the challenge here.
> if, say, the community was hacked and private email addresses (or other PII) was leaked.
Or just basic ISP, or other provider, logging domains visited per user.
Threat model this shit.
I would dead man switch the storage's Azure instance. Mayybe the whole thing. Mayybe shouldn't be on azure.
Nm assumed RLS as a MS TLA. PGsql has it as well. Comment stands, watch data residency.
I am taking security very seriously. All sensitive rows are protected by RLS, and I have gone even further by adding random noise to all location data. Locations are locked down, but in the unfortunate event of a hack what would be leaked is location within a 5 or so mile range, not exact location.
If it is possible on Supabase I would like to eventually obscure emails and oauth info.
5 mile range is pretty serious, it narrows someones locations down to a single town in the entire world. Just dont store it at all and you're all good.
You'd need just a little more data to find the individual.
Why even keep location data at all?
One of the main selling points of the app is that you can filter posts by distance, to facilitate people meeting and talking with their community.
So list a city?
I'm wondering if it's more or less safe (from doxxers attacking individual users, or the entire service being compromised) to share location with this app vs. Lex. In any case I chose not to share location yet, and don't know if Lex is any safer (they require location).
email me if you need a code review
Without wishing to appear overly snippy, this is how I would begin hacking such a site.
Offer to do a "code review".
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I got an offer of a "code review" like that once for an authentication system and never heard back; it was open source anyway so anybody could have downloaded it and found my rookie mistakes like
which doesn't stop anyone from appending to the content (might not have really been exploitable, but any honest review from somebody who knew more than me would have turned it up)> Without wishing to appear overly snippy
You failed.
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That's not an observation. That's speculation.
Fairly valid speculation, I my opinion.
If I were in the US, and particularly in one of the seriously intolerant red states, there's no way I'd want and of my details in their database.
I don't think it's catastrophising to consider there may well be very real risks to being openly trans in the US in the near future. Risks of not only blackhat 4chan hackers, but also from government and legal system attacks on sites like this.
There's nothing new about this, sad though it is. People, particularly insecure people, have tried to suppress minorities since the dawn of time, and they're constantly inventing new ways to do it.
Interesting ... why can't I Vouch for this post?
It's [flagged] but not [dead]. Past explanations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39676944
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548
this is the most insane thread I have ever seen on hn.
"no good deed goes unpunished" comes to mind
Posthog was definitely a relevant choice for this project.
Text is barely readable. What part of this is trans friendly? Do trans people not have eyes?
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If the goal is to be lightweight why is it app only and not just a web page?
Good work!
Let’s say this network continues to grow; how do you anticipate funding its future operations?
A decent percent of people are voluntarily paying for it right now, enough that it is already profitable at about a 10:1 ratio of profit vs cost of operation. The platform can grow quite a lot without expenses going up since my main expense is just server power, and I am not using much of that at all right now.
I think I have engineered it all to scale well, and I don't anticipate costs increasing. The plan right now is to not run ads, and to make almost all features free for all users in perpetuity.
I wish I could do the same for people with depression
Make a Mastodon instance.
amazing that the t4t handle hasn’t already been taken lol. also def feel like this has a large slant towards mtfs, any idea on demographic breakdown?
A great idea and deeply necessary.
Please be very, very careful with security. That includes logging as little as you can get away with. Your site is a tempting target for a certain class of people.
literally my first thought - would be a nightmare if the user list leaked with emails or something
It's horrible that you have to issue cautions like that but it's true.
open source?
(Sorry for the offtopicness but would you mind emailing hn@ycombinator.com? I have some information that might potentially be relevant.)
Oh sure, will do
I'm not going to install the app, not sure what that blocks me from but not going to do it. and there's really nothing that tells me why I would like to use the app. I guess reply? or post? the web part seems pretty bare, I can't tell if it's meant to thread, or go longer with infinite scroll, or be a conversation, or just a wall of posts. I don't get the concept based on the website.
Don't trans people usually date/meet with non-trans people!?
No, trans people dating other trans people is actually extremely common (both homo- and heterosexual). Often because both (or more) people often understand each others struggles and wants way better than cis people do, and simply because if you like spending time primarily in trans-heavy communities, you will likely fall for someone who's also trans.
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The HSTS / AGP dichotomy is not taken seriously among trans people or care providers, don't listen to this person.
In the post-Karl Popper academic landscape, it's hard to beat the absurdity to explanatory-power ratio of Sigmund Freud's "penis envy", but Ray Blanchard's ravings about trans people are certainly a contender.
The "science experiments" he ran to "support" his "theories" aren't quite Philip Zimbardo levels of unethical quackery, but I'm still not sure how attaching electrodes to people's genitals and making them watch porn is a sensible way to categorise anyone, even ignoring the fudging required to make his experiments show the "correct" results.
> In the post-Karl Popper academic landscape
OT: What do you mean by that? I know Popper, I can guess what you mean, but what do you mean?
I mean that scientific theories nowadays are supposed to make testable predictions, and when those predictions consistently fail, you have to say "okay, this theory is not correct". If your theory is capable of "explaining" every possible piece of evidence, it's not a scientific theory. (Some people would go further than Karl Popper, saying that it's not even meaningful.)
I'm pretty sure this is in The Open Society and Its Enemies, but I can't remember. I do know that it's in this webcomic: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/285
Thanks. Not to dive too far into the weeds ... but I'm wondering if there's something I misunderstand about Popper:
> If your theory is capable of "explaining" every possible piece of evidence, it's not a scientific theory.
Do you mean, if your theory is not falsifiable? If your falsifiable theory is not (yet) falsified, if you magically know it never will be falsified, isn't it still a theory?
(If it's just a matter of wording on an Internet comment, then sorry to bother you - I don't mean to play gotcha.)
I've misused the word "possible": I meant to say that if the theory is equally-capable of "explaining" two mutually-incompatible states of affairs, it does not actually have the explanatory power that all scientific theories must have. Which, yes, I think "falsifiable" is the correct word for that. (Although, you'll note that my explanation of "falsifiable" is not precisely correct. I think I've convinced myself that there is no logically-precise definition of "falsifiable", and that it inherently leans on some intuitive notion of "possibly-falsifying evidence" which we have to take for granted, like philosophical induction.)
However, that was itself me being lazy, because Blanchard's typology does make concrete predictions about what sorts of people exist. The assertion that people can be classified into "attracted to women" and "not attracted to women" is refuted by the Kinsey Reports (and many better studies besides); the assertion that being trans is a sex thing is refuted by the existence of certain ace trans people; the assertion that transition is about imitation is refuted by the existence of certain non-binary people…
Of course, Ray Blanchard himself bolts on new categories whenever he can't fudge the analysis to fit a pre-existing conclusion – last I checked, he had around 10 categories – but most adherents treat the original two categories as dogma. (The lengths to which people will go for a gender binary…)
Really, I should say that if you're cis and relying on thought experiments, Blanchard's typology is unfalsifiable: you will simply not be able to observe any evidence that refutes it. I myself (not then having much contact with out trans people (if we discount Reddit)) had to do a lot of introspection (could I rule out self-deception? wishful thinking? how?) before I concluded that either my internal subjective experience refuted the typology (and its variants), or I was too insane to be capable of reasoning. This tendency towards solipsism did not do me many favours (and was ultimately quite harmful, for reasons I will not discuss here), but it did at least prepare me for the many other academics who talk out of their arses about things they have no legitimate claim to expertise in, save for being among the first academics to study it. (Or, in Ray Blanchard's case, among the first academics to study it after the Nazi purge.)
I am not advocating for Blanchard in any way, in case I'm giving that impression, just talking about Popper in general.
Thought experiments, unless something provable like mathematics, are worse than useless, they are deceiving. There is an evil demon that deceives us, that we cannot overcome.
The only source of knowledge is to go out and ask, 'what do you mean?' Thanks for answering!
You're not giving that impression, but your criticism was warranted. (I don't understand falsification as well as I thought I did.)
I wouldn't quite say that thought experiments are always deceiving (Albert Einstein found them quite useful, for example), but they are very parodiable. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/183
> "Did he just… not see any of us?" "Rationalists are terrible at seeing stuff. He probably just tried to deduce who was here from reason alone."
> criticism
Really, purely curiosity. At first, one thing I was wondering was if some new theory might have caught hold in some corner of academia, for example. Then I wondered if I misunderstood falsification myself.
> Einstein found them quite useful, for example
He is why I made the exception for math. His 'experiment' used math (exclusively?) - and wasn't relied upon until confirmed empirically.
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Any argument against zodiac (birth) signs would apply equally well here. In fact, zodiac signs survive criticism better, because at least they have well-defined boundary conditions. What kind of "fetishistic transvestism" do I have if I'm a sex-repulsed aromantic trans woman?
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So it fits "essentially every individual", except the example I just gave? Come on, even Freudian psychoanalysis has a better success rate than that.
> the excruciating process of transition
I have only ever seen people describe transition with words like "excruciating" for two reasons:
• Social barriers, e.g. medical gatekeeping, transphobic bigotry.
• Believing in the Blanchard or 4chan classification systems, and constantly judging themselves accordingly.
Please don't hold onto this so tight. It's not healthy, and there's zero evidence that it's even remotely true.
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Could you please stop taking this thread down a generic tangent, which is inevitably a generic flamewar tangent? This is a Show HN thread about t4t's new forum.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://aella.substack.com/p/everyone-has-autogynephilia
If you want to base your understanding of the world on data rather than anecdata, here.
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> we can move on
Considering you've replied to 3 different threads starting the same flame war (and are apparently unwilling to accept actual data), I am very skeptical of your ability to move on.
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Can you cite any trans person who publicly agrees with your description of them as "HSTS"?
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I would assume most non-trans people aren't willing to date trans people, so there's probably a pretty glaring need for them to have their own spaces.
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For casual readers: Blanchard's theories are widely discredited and "Autogynephile" is considered an impolite term among trans people.
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> Blanchard's work reigns as the clinically accepted typology for patients seeking transition.
False. The clinically accepted typology is 'Gender Dysphoria', as under the DSM-5. The only place AGP is referenced in the DSM is as a subtype of 'Transvestic Disorder' (Transvestic Disorder With Autogynephilia), which is marked explicitly as crossdressing and imagining oneself as a woman solely for sexual purposes. The two diagnoses (Gender Dysphoria and Transvestic Disorder) are distinct from one another and not related.
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That has not been the case in the three cities and health systems (edit: in the US) in which I've had transgender care over the past decade.
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I've never heard a doctor say those words, I think you're a troll
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In 2024 I went on a bit of a dating spree and I had first dates with 6 other trans women. 1 cis woman ghosted me.
I think most cis women-who-love-women do like trans women, but they just have more options.
Indeed. It's hard to believe that until relatively recently people thought that sexual attraction was fundamentally based in biology rather than identity.
Sexual attraction is fundamentally based in biology.
Trans people are part of biology. It's what happens when you are exposed to cross-sex hormones.
Personally, I tend to view (my own) transition as embracing an intersex condition with medical intervention.
The longer I've been involved with the queer community the fuzzier things get. I very much looked and acted like a guy when I was younger but was drawn to lesbians and always seemed to get along with them and they were the only people I felt comfortable talking about women's bodies with. My first 2 hookups after I started transitioning were with cis lesbians. This was before I started hormone therapy. The relationship I was in when I came out was with someone who still identifies as a cishet woman but 3 of her exes have come out as trans women in their 30s. There are so many ways to be attracted to people and strange ways we are drawn to each other. I've noticed that the kinds of people that are casually interested in me has changed with my body but my own conception of what desire is has become so nebulous.
But many trans women have no hormonal or surgical interventions at all. Are you implying that cis lesbians are not attracted to them?
Hmm.. I dunno.
Not implicating anything in particular, other than that biology is ridiculously complex. I can only speak from personal experience.
Before I transitioned, I noticed there was a pattern in my life where cis lesbians were interested in me, I've even dated a lesbian cis girl _as a boy_ when I was about 15 or something like that.
Biology is very strange.
I personally use the word "soul" for this kind of stuff. But that's nonsensical in the end.
Humans rarely neatly fit into sharply defined boxes with no bleed across boundaries.
if attraction not biological how one get attracted to another? by being educated that humans generally do? there's nothing ruling out biology in that
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I hate to ask this, but with the timing of the current US elections and presidential mandate, seeing this appear out of the blue scares me more than anything. Do you have any existing handles or presence in the community I can use to double check? Thanks.
You can check the review history on either app, the project has existed for a full year. The timing is a coincidence, but I do understand the paranoia.
Mobile app only and no source code? I appreciate the effort but I'll stick with Mastodon for now.
The source is actually freely available for both the app and the web: https://gitea.com/t4t
Took a quick look through the sources (I'm aware they're not officially intended for local builds) but haven't found anything interesting (yet). First impressions:
- The API keys are obtained using flutter_dotenv, and omitted from the Git source but trivially extractable from the Play Store APK (using a rooted phone).
- After installing the .env file and building t4t locally, I was unable to log into the Android app using a Gmail account; every attempt left the app in a not-logged-in state. The same thing happened after replacing my local app with the Play Store version? (EDIT: After restarting the app I was able to proceed?)
- (nitpick/observation) When I tap a post, the app opens the user's post history, and I try scrolling the list, the view lags behind my finger. Can't tell if it's latency, dropped frames, or both together.
These are all public keys so I am not too worried, but I appreciate the heads up. I will make more effort to obfuscate them.
> no source code?
The way that some people on HN so casually demand someone to build something and then completely give it away never ceases to disappoint. Thankfully the fact that this community is growing tells me this is not how most people think.
With the current politics, how do you expect minorities to trust a product with their identity and (sometimes) life, if you can’t inspect what’s being done with your data?
Real question : how do you verify that the source code matches the code of the service you’re using? Is there some service that builds and hosts and you can verify what it builds against the hosted location?
You can only ever really ensure the client you use wasn't tampererd with, by carefully reading all of its source code and then building it yourself. For every update.
Realistically, you will always need a minimum amount of trust, just don't misplace it.
The minimum amount of trust is clearly a lot less for open source software because anyone can view the source and whistleblow vulnerabilities (and many will regularly do so to contribute or modify it anyways).
Also, compiling and verifying software updates is pretty easy for typical application programs. I do it for cryptocurrency software, you just look over diffs and make sure it matches up to the changelog.
yes, this is exactly what open source "app stores" like f-droid do: reproducible builds. Also it is pretty trivial to compile it yourself to confirm.
Doesn't matter if the app is just an interface to a web server.
if it's just an interface to a web server, it should just be a web page not an app
Just because I can compile it doesn’t mean it’s the same as what’s being run on the service.
The build and what’s hosted have to be the same.
Many people here do not view providing source code as "completely giving it away".
it could have just been a website
Looks more like a community of horny people and other weird stuff.
I immediately saw:
- Someone who wants to be treated as a dog
- Someone who listed their "new experiences" which included "getting fisted", "being fucked with a (fake) knife", "sleeping in a dog crate" and more.
- Someone looking for sex
WTF?
Okay posting this is really reminding me to prioritize a smart nsfw toggle. My guess is that if you just scrolled twitter or whatever by new exclusively unfiltered you wouldn’t have that different an experience.
I just logged in to my twitter account for the first time in years to test this. I'm not sure if I'm "scrolling by new unfiltered", but one of two things is true.
1. The experience is different. I'm not seeing any of that type of content.
or
2. It's not obvious how to "scroll by new unfiltered". If I'm not doing it, I can't see how to do it. I would never do it accidentally.
I dont think this is true at all.
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some bsky image firehoses frontpaged on hn a while back, and gyatdam we all seen some shit
typical but also foreseeable. please be responsible
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(to be pedantic: gender expression not exactly sexuality... )
@t4t :
which is 100% fine.
Just keep PII out of government hands, while verifying users before showing them content.
While you get the NSFW toggling working. I would (for an over abundance of caution) turn off all content previews for non registered users.
I am logged into lgbt community on reddit. I was curious what it is like there. Significant amount is just posts with pictures in front of mirrors. Not nsfw, but self-absorbed.
> Looks more like a community of horny people and other weird stuff.
Communities of horny people are indeed weird stuff.
I remember one time when I accidentally happened upon one such community, naively thinking it was just a local bar.
Oh wait, that's every local bar I've ever set foot in.
What community do you live in, and what do they put in the water there? :)
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Just echoing other comments as the first post I saw was from someone who wanted a knife so they could "stab girls" while whispering in their ear that they are "getting their hormones". Wow.
Well it's important to note that they are stabbing them with a "hrt" knife.
That makes it less strange and creepy?
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Because it uses Flutter?
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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Because focusing on biological ratios is generally considered to be incredibly rude in such a community (and probably most communities?)
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Yes, because there are very few instances where you would genuinely need to know that information. If you are in one of those (hint: you are my primary care physician or romantic partner), I will offer it to you freely. I believe this even though my biological and expressed gender align.
There are plenty of characteristics that are rude to ask even when they are factual. Asking people their age is often rude, even though it's not something they can change. Nobody is offended by the fact that they are not 21 but they can definitely be offended if you point that out to them.
Asking people's age for statistical purposes or reporting that statistic is not at all rude. It's anonymous.
Please cite the LGBTQ oriented communities you are part of where it is considered polite to quiz people about their genitals.
Please cite the transsexual oriented communities you are part of in which it isn't considered polite to ask people about their preferred pronoun, from which the male/female ratio can be inferred with high confidence. (she: male, he: female)
> and I would avoid communities where it would be seen as wrong
are you part of this t4t community?
He was obviously responding to "and probably most communities?"
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It's time you stopped creating accounts to prosecute this fixation on HN.
Agreed with the other poster. You are great at not letting this hateful rhetoric fester. Most times I see anything like that by the time I refresh the page I'll notice the comment is already removed.
I wish that were true, but thank you both for saying so.
dang, you have my endless gratitude for not allowing transphobia on HN
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Regardless of your views on social issues, you can't post like this here. Since we've warned you before and you've continued to break the guidelines, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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Trust me, there are many sufferable trans people. They're everywhere. The ones that are sufferable are the ones you don't notice :)
Disclaimer: what I wrote here is explicitly aimed at the post I replied to. Not to anybody else.
I'll stop.
Thanks.
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that place is catastrophizing central and i would recommend against getting attached to it in any way
Sorry for being ignorant but what is that place?
It's a moniker for the 4chan board /lgbt/. The name comes from "To tell the truth," namely due to the reputation of trans 4chan users to be very harsh to one another.
that's a backronym at best
the original joke was that despite being called /LGBT/ like 80 percent of all threads were about trans topics for a while at the start, with wlw and mlm general threads kinda on the side
so "trans trans trans trans"
For those watching at home: being harsh is not the same thing as being truthful.
4chan place