an update on the exposur.es project

an update and an explaination of what happened to exposur.es will be shared here soon.

until then, i wish you plenty of breezy & sunny (or rainy or snowy or foggy or Victorian or whichever your ideal shooting conditions are 😉) ahead and oh so many perfect exposures.

all the best,

frank

01 September 2025 — an update

exposur.es, the Pixelfed instance (a purported "ethical alternative" to Meta's Instagram) which i launched in April of 2024, was terminated and all data was irrevocably deleted without warning after i had fallen behind on payments by one month's invoice with the hosting provider.

despite developing rapport with the staff of this tiny hosting outfit in Florida and operating under the notion that they were embedded enough in the Fediverse and its culture—considering they run a company focused on it—to be fully aware that instance admins overwhelmingly are barely keeping the lights on as we beg for the bare minimum of financial support, the response from the employee was so mechanical and devoid of any amiability or empathy.

reflecting on the countless hours i shoveled into the project like coal in a boiler over the course of 18 months—the sleepless nights to concoct workarounds to the shortcomings of the shoddily-built platform software, and pulling my hair out to fix an array of issues ranging from defederation and censorship from prudish instance admins and a petulant, vindictive platform developer to contacting artists i admire to encourage them to join to learning how to use backend Linux systems from scratch—i accepted that i was not likely to ever receive the support i needed to share the load to make it work, that there were simply far too many factors at play to make it work even if i did manage to rally the support, and that, crucially, this wasn't how i wanted to spend my life.

the reality is that the Fediverse is a concept that seems nearly ideal in theory but is riddled with flaws in practice because it requires a fluid, mutualistic & synergystic relation to and between every component and decision-making body (be it an instance admin or software devs or an organization deciding on protocols and roadmaps and principles) and a certain degree of autonomy (e.g. the agency to make decisions for yourself, unaffected by the influence of others). unless you have total domain over every facet to the project—every layer in the stack; software, development process, physical control of the server infrastructure, agency to guide the process to fit the needs & wants of those using your isntance—then you're ultimately at the mercy of whoever is uncooperative, unforgiving, exploitative, or coercive that controls a portion of the infrastructure required to make your instance function. even when you do have both a symbiotic relationship and maintain a portion of the critcal hardware, the project is still affected by forces larger than the Fediverse, like ISPs, state laws, and shifting cultural norms, which, have been swinging in a direction hostile toward groups who were ostensibly embraced half a decade ago, in favor of regressive modesty movements, sex worker-exclusionary purity culture, queerphobic and transphobic movements like "4B" and "boysober", and pervasive and normalized ableism and tacit eugenics.

a solid example would be the very hosting provider i used to host exposur.es. when pressed on their terms of service of what type of material would constitute "obscene and objectionable content", an employee explained to me that they used the long-since-discredited Miller Test which only greases the machine of suppression of speech & expression and preserves white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal christian fundamental ideals.

mechanics and politics and social currents and cultural forces aside, this experience was the awakening i needed. the project was wholly unfulfilling, not even approaching the objectives i laid out when beginning, and consuming all of my time and energy—cheifly, my creative energy. now, i know that i've long said that creativity is something that can only increase with use, i believe, especially in the current age of digital technologies, that certain activities tap into our creative energy stores and deplete them. perhaps, it's an extension of capitalistic exploitative systems or perhaps some other force at play; regardless, the project, and all that keeping it alive entailed, was preventing me from replenishing my creative energy. i had gone out to shoot fewer than a handful of times over that year and a half long period. even when i did manage to shoot, it wasn't more than a frame here or there in aimless street photography. i had not truly created since the Summer before the Spring when i finally launched the project, and it was actually killing me.

now, with the clarity that comes from distance from a problem or situation, i came to the conclusion that, for me to "relaunch" exposur.es, it could only exist offline. or, at least, not on the modern web rather on hidden overlay networks or alternative protocols. ideally, though, it would be purely analog. the spirit of the project would be the culmination of the principles cultivated by people who have decided to move offline, whether to subvert capitalism and surveillance, because they were the victim of censorship or social exclusion of some manner, or to revive the vivacity of arts culture in their region. because who doesn't miss the art scenes of the 2000s & 2010s, with their installations and in-person gatherings, and collaborative atmospheres, and the near total lack of influence consumerism and the like had on us or our mediums. and that's not a misplaced or problematic nostalgia—those eras, no doubt, had their own failures & shortcomoings. i believe we can take what we've learned and how we've grown since the beginning of this decade (assuming we have learned and become self-aware of our biases and privileges), however, pair it with the best parts of previous eras, and concoct an environment which facilitates our self-actualization as well as a collective-actualization, so we're able to create art that builds a better world.

in time, i hope to find others who share this sort of framework and with whom i have common principles. until then, i plan to focus on my own art and my health.