Futureporn September 2024 Progress Report

Dreams come true

I occasionally find myself in disbelief about things that have happened. Not too long ago, I was living an aimless life. I knew I enjoyed software development but I kept working jobs that were completely unrelated to my talents. On a long walk after quitting yet another unfulfilling job, I made the resolution-- "I'm going to become a paid software developer or die trying." After about 5 years of working at it, I'm there, and I'm so grateful for it. It's proof to me that hard work pays off, and we can do anything we want to do in this life.

I don't want to get too comfortable and stop trying; I'm going to continue setting new goals and working towards them. I want to take Futureporn to the next level and build all the features that started out as hopes and dreams. Sync your vibe with your oshi's while playing back an old VOD. Clip your favorite moments so you can horny post them on X. These are just ideas for Futureporn right now, but they won't stay that way. Time and pressure is all it takes.

Thank you

Thank you Jack Conte for being a chad and creating Patreon. Thank you to the patrons who have opened up your wallets to support me. Thank you Futureporn Discord moderators for your patience, ideas, and advice. Thank you to everyone who chats there or reports website issues. Thank you to the reader who reads this post right now. Thank you for your support, I couldn't do this work without you!

An apology

I'd like to apologize for the lack of progress updates over the past two months. I've been working in hiding because I fell into a nasty shame spiral. I went several months working very hard, setting high expectations for myself, and failing to meet them. The 15th would roll around and I'd have a half-finished prototype that I wasn't ready to release. I'd be burnt out and beat myself up about it. It was a routine thing of pain and it got to the point where I didn't want to write anything at all.

I had to take a step back and try caring less. Caring less about the speed of improvement. Caring less about what people say. Caring less about expectations. Caring less about perfection.

I care about living a good life. I care about doing meaningful work. I care about community and providing value to people.

I care about a lot of things and that's good. It gets bad when I care about things so much to where I stop caring about myself. I hope to make small improvements in this area until it isn't a showstopping issue anymore. Thank you for your patience!

I'm once again committing to posting monthly progress reports. I think I owe that much to everyone who is supporting me in building Futureporn. Thank you again!

Housekeeping

There are a lot of pain points in Futureporn's codebase. Unnecessary things, fragile systems. It's been easy to look away and design around them, but doing that causes technical debt that ends up slowing me down in the long run. Lately I've been going in and removing parts that don't make sense. I've been deleting things that add unnecessary complexity and finding better ways to accomplish them. It's busy work that takes lots of time, but I think slimming down the bloat is a phase that's absolutely necessary right now.

Growing pains

There are lots of problems. It takes me 1-2 hours to process and publish a new VOD. Sometimes I miss recording a stream. It's difficult transferring a large VOD to me from someone who does have it. The tags editor is janky. The video player shows errors if you stay logged in for more than 30 days. I don't have a good way of recording Fansly streams. VOD updates from vtubers other than Mel have stopped. The mods don't have any tools to manage the system if I'm away. Bandwidth is expensive and I don't know if the income we have scales to hosting VODs of all lewdtubers.

With these issues and more, I sometimes doubt myself. I think that there are so many issues that I can't possibly make progress on anything. But that's when I remind myself of my core belief; that humans are capable of solving any problem. I believe that we can solve any challenge.

A clear path forward

Growth is important. Regular updates are important. Making Futureporn something that is not just my project is important. We have the potential to make this our project where we preserve VODs from all lewdtubers for generations to come. We can make it robust, reliable, and easy to use.

To have a website that can handle the growth at all levels, it all comes back to the system that builds the system. Every time a VOD gets uploaded, we need fast, consistent results to get that VOD published and servable to people all around the globe. The build system has gone through several iterations in the past few years. From automated, to semi-automated, to completely broken. Right now the build system is me. I have a checklist that I go through which consists of a lot of manual tasks. Concat, remux, thumbmail, create database records, add to IPFS and eventually publish on the site.

It's an error prone process and it's slow, but it works for a site that focuses on only one lewdtuber. That's old news, and Futureporn is destined to become something more. That's why I've been spending time and energy to learn everything I can about distributed systems and work queues. I'm excited about where this is going because I think this next generation is the simplest, most performant, most cost-effective solution yet.

Update when?

It's been months since the last website feature update and I know that some of you have been patiently waiting. I don't want to fall into the vicious cycle I mentioned earlier, with looming deadlines and setting expectations for what's coming next month and ultimately failing to deliver.

I don't have an answer for when the next update is coming. All I can promise right now is that I'm working through my issues and I want to make you proud. I'll keep working on it bit by bit until it's done.