FetLife’s user interface helps it be tough to look for historic details on your website, referring to intentional. FetLife additionally efficiently repels the world wide web indexing robots of yahoo along with other the search engines, making it difficult to recover or archive information from inside FetLife’s walls, and this is intentional. When information on tasks that result inside FetLife experience the outside community, FetLife’s military of volunteers purely authorities outside websites with unlawful Digital Millennium copyright laws work takedown notices (I know—I’ve individually battled about 12 of those appropriate risks from FetLife’s “carebears”), and this refers to deliberate. (require some instances? Decide to try here, here, or here, once 
again, merely off the very top of my personal head.)
Exactly why would FetLife feel very committed to quashing topic about these occurrences?
Because without proof of a routine, the white supremacist story of “isolated incidents” was probable. You can’t point out that “the SADOMASOCHISM Scene has a racism difficulty” with a lot conviction if you do not may also look at discrete cases wherein racism or any other as a type of bigotry ended up being institutionally, also violently shielded time upon time after energy, every year after season, over and over again and once again.
You’ll need a structure. To ascertain a pattern. You want facts.
If FetLife can possibly prevent historic facts from being accessible, there is no-one to build a design of poor attitude. And, naturally, this sort of “forced forgetfulness” is actually intentional. As I had written yesterday, “the right to feel forgotten” is actually abusive:
The erasure of background are a defining component of oppressive practices on the macro-scale of records, but also on the micro-scale of social communication. Guys exactly who beat their spouses use the fact their own ex-wives usually do not alert their brand new brides they are abusive assholes. Serial rapists count on the reality that their own victims will not have the benefit of communication with their previous sufferers being perpetrate numerous assaults. The concept that we should give people the power to implement a kind of “forgetting” on others is really an awful idea that the only real cause it gains benefit try either the shortsightedness or perhaps the deliberate sociopathy of the advocates.
Quite some years ago, once I had been a great deal more youthful nonetheless naively thought the SADO MASO subculture earned any respect, I noticed the publishing regarding the wall surface and typed an essay named “FetLife thought Harmful,” in which I contended this subculture’s electronic poster child, FetLife, had been “the worst of both planets” pertaining to both on the internet and face to face society. Working with some collaborators, we developed numerous pc software resources to help individuals make use of FetLife in a safer and much more individually motivated means, perhaps the most famous which will be the Predator alarm Tool for FetLife. But another means is called FetLife Export, also it tends to make a wholesale copy of a FetLife account’s activity.
Using FetLife Export, you may make a total, searchable snapshot of your or other FetLife user’s whole accounts activity with just multiple ticks. The device is really similar to wget in that it makes an archive of website pages, however in this case the archive is particular to confirmed FetLife user’s posts, “likes/loves,” remarks in-group talks, wall-to-wall conversations, also FetLife-specific qualities. It is helpful because it means once you see someone making a racist or sexist remark on a FetLife bond, you’ll install a copy regarding whole FetLife records in one single decrease swoop—everything they’ve ever before mentioned in public places view on FetLife—and after that retroactively query their unique previous listings for any other, similar or related remarks.
Whatever might as soon as state try an “isolated event” will manage very, different for the light of a complete historic log of their behavior on FetLife.
I’ve been using this instrument regularly because it was initially revealed. Should you wonder the way I is so “plugged in” to what’s happening when you look at the SADOMASOCHISM Scene, how I can so fast link the dots between who-knows-who, it’s partially because I making and employ these archives to acquire models that you could just discover as soon as you surveil the entire SADOMASOCHISM world in near-real time. It’s an excellent software for everyone carrying out general research, muckraking, or investigative revealing concerning SADO MASO Scene.
If you’d will find out more about making use of the FetLife Exporter your self, study my short tutorial guide, “HowTo: install a whole content of every FetLife user’s posts, photographs, commentary, and other activity using the FetLife Export wizard,” which describes utilizing and ways to download the software by yourself pc. If you have trouble getting it working and would like to, feel free to contact me directly (whether publicly, privately, or however you prefer) and I’ll be happy to walk you through it.