If you have been around Neocities recently, you might have heard about F+F (FederieFederi), or maybe you were actually part of the project before it perished just like me. While I mostly avoid gossiping and drama, it is something I wanted to talk about because they have been around in my Neocities feed, and it still feels kinda odd not having random people's comments replying to F+F.
F+F is a project to advertise new and underrated Neocities sites, starting from October 2023. They would put the buttons of the sites in a wall, and people can click them to view the websites. Every month, the neighbours in the project can enter the monthly featured section by liking a announcement post, and as soon as they fit the rules, they will be featured on the main page for a month. This is a extremely simplified explaination, you can look up F+F for more information.
My experience with them isn't really special. Sometime around November I think, I saw a red dot on the top right corner, indicating a new follower. I rarely respond to new followers (I appreciate them, but I feel like talking to someone for following me feels kinda weird?), but I always go check their sites. Unlike most sites I see, I noticed many comments saying how they find the project interesting, and only then I noticed it's content is other people's buttons. I don't remember the details, but I was also included in the wall. Since then, I often scroll on their wall to check out any cool art sites.
Here's a little funny thing. Around two months ago, I found that my button being hidden in their wall, and inspecting their code I found that I might have been 'banned' (Can you actually ban or block someone on Neocities? Or is it some other mechanic I'm missing out?). I was a bit confused, but I came up with two possibilities: 1. They made a mistake 2. My content doesn't fit their rules anymore. I rethought what I posted to have them remove button, I didn't put anything inappropriate, I didn't even have topless men at that time yet, the worst thing here is probably the occasional vent posts but it does not violate any rules. I kinda gave up thinking about it for a while cuz I didn't mind, and after a while I saw F+F saying something about buttons, and I realized another possibility. I checked my button, it was somehow 89x32, what?! Perhaps something went wrong when I was editing the borders of my button, anyways I fixed it and F+F added me back. But still, I find it quite funny that my button was just one pixel off from the standard button, as if I'm messing with the button culture... but I wonder why F+F is so strict on the button size?
Occasionally, I would see a few people saying how F+F is kinda suspicious, and there had been rumours about something, and yet the details are incredibly vague, I cannot judge anything so I just moved on with my day. Fast forward to April, where things start to spiral down. F+F announced that they will unfollow everyone since Neocities' default website order is most followed, and Neocities doesn't count mutual followers into the follower count, and F+F decided to do that to get to top 8. I didn't really mind being unfollowed, the project will still work as intended: giving exposure to underappreciated sites.
Then something surprising happened, more and more people commented how they don't support the project anymore and wanted to leave. From what I can understand, the major reasons are that they don't want to chase popularity like modern social media, they don't like F+F's strong tone, and they suspect F+F being a Follow for Follow scheme. Comments were being flooded in F+F's (and many followers') feed, some being against F+F while some still doesn't really care, and then there's some who spams just for fun. Scrolling through the huge line of text, I even saw some familiar usernames, so that's entertaining.
I kept mostly silent in this situation, like how I stated I don't involve myself in dramas. I'm mostly surprised by the amount of people disagreeing with F+F. I don't really feel anything negative about F+F, perhaps due to my nature of listening to anyone even if they had the most unreasonable orders. Even after doing research about F+F, I still don't understand how Follow for Follow scheme is bad, it feels like something I'd commonly see in social media. And I was quite interested how people commented that they came to Neocities to avoid the social media flow. While I have seen people writing that they created their sites to get away from something like Twitter, I did not expect them to actually dislike chasing for views and likes. So that's a new thing I learnt about Neocities culture. For me, it is nice when people view and comment on my stuff, and at the same time I don't mind having low views, having low views means that less people see some embarrassing stuff, it's a neutral thing. Perhaps one thing I understand the most is the weirdly strong tone in their messages, though I assumed that it is just what happens with messages with no tone indicators...
Few days into the incident, F+F had cleared all the messages on their feed. They are going on a temporary hiatus, I assumed. One day later, I found out on a message of someone I follow... F+F's site was deleted. I was quite shocked, I initially thought they deleted it out of stress, but turns out their site was reported and Neocities took it down. And so that's it, so far F+F hasn't came back, and from what some sources said, they might not return.
I wouldn't say F+F has much impact on my site, or at least I don't know, because from the messages I've gotten, none of them said they came from F+F. Perhaps F+F's actions wasn't that great, but I kinda miss them? Maybe it's because of a habit where I would scroll their wall to check out cool websites, in fact some people I follow are found through F+F. And also, it might just me not knowing how to manage my followings and feeds, it feels kinda empty here not being spammed with messages. It was kinda annoying, but now it feels quiet. Well at least there is an archive of F+F, so it wasn't too late to continue check out these underappreciated sites, just like F+F said.