>>17153This topic has been beaten to death several times on /tech/ alone, let alone other parts of the internet/chaniverse. I'll leave this copypasta here which basically explains the whole thing.
——————–
Vichan: the software that just won’t die
Why vichan hasn’t been replaced and probably never willVichan and Vichan derivatives such as lainchan have long been the standard of imageboards in the “alt chan” universe. Briefly, Lynxchan looked poised to take over as the imageboard standard, but it’s reliance on mongodb left it vulnerable to data corruption and unreliability issues.
Any semi-competant coder can create an imageboard with 80%+ feature parity with vichan within a few weeks or even days. So why, after all this time, has no imageboard managed to take over from vichan?
Wordpress is blogging software written in PHP, from the dark ages when PHP was a terribly designed language. Like vichan, wordpress is a structureless, poorly written, outdated, spaghettified oldphp-based piece of shit. Yet, it persists. There are countless plugins, themes, and tutorials created for it, which enable countless nontechnical small business owners to create good looking websites with prebuilt themes. The very ease of use corresponds with it being hell to maintain and write plugins for. Ironically this self-induced difficulty has created a whole ecosystem of plugin and theme developers, selling overbloated plugins that perform functionality that could really be done in a few lines of code, mindlessly installed by nontechnical bloggers. Even conservatively, around 30%+ of all websites use wordpress, including major corporations like airlines, banks, and media conglomerates. The fact is, there is a self fufilling prophecy, where a software’s popularity can meme itself into existence. Wordpress is the Kim Kardashian of cms software: popular for being popular, despite an utter lack of any other redeeming qualities. And vichan is essentially the wordpress of imageboard software.
Like wordpress, there is a whole ecosystem of people who have become familiar with vichan+derivatives, their configuration options, their ticks, their idiosyncrasies, and have created an ecosystem of themes, scripts, and so forth. Not to mention a userbase which is used to the vichan style UI/UX experience and revolts at the slightest change. After all, that’s really what usability is: familiarity.
It’s entirely possible to create a piece of imageboard software that has feature parity with vichan, but it is much more difficult to create a piece of imageboard software which slavishly recreates all of vichan’s idiosyncrasies, ticks, warts, and all, which is really what people want: a drop in replacement. And since the whole point of creating new software would be to get away from some of the warts, the potential writer realizes that there is really no point in trying to begin with, other than maybe as some masochistic coding exercise. This is why lynxchan was really doomed from the beginning, whatever it’s technical merits or drawbacks.
The chans are dying. Really, they have been dying a slow death for quite some time, given a bit of a boost from the anti-sjw/Trump mid 2010s era, but quickly returning to a dying status, accelerated by the death of 8chan. Now, in the minds of normies, chans represent at worst, a hellhole filled with incels, white supremacists, pedophiles, and god knows what else. At best, they represent a “boomer” style of communication that’s deeply uncool, as opposed to the dopamine inducing, shiny-colored-box experience of tiktok and fbi.govs.
The conservatism and resistance to change of the current chan userbase is inherently connected to it’s age. While there are of course some young people, the preponderance of current alt-chan users are 25-40 year old millennials who came of age during the 2000s “golden era” of 4chan. This can be seen most clearly on lainchan, which is rife with arcane references to gibsonian cyberpunk novels, 1990s anime, ‘hackers’, and disgraced free software guru/activist Richard Stallman.
Like an aging video game with a slowly eroding multiplayer playerbase, the chan era is slowly passing from history. Many of the young, edgy people who would have been attracted to chans in previous eras are now on platforms like disc.ord. The whole appeal of php-based chans is that cash strapped youth could buy cheap shared hosting and slap a chan together with minimal technical knowledge and little money. Now, fbi.gov allows them to do the same thing with absolutely no technical knowledge, no money, and no effort. The barrier to entry is far lower, not to mention that a fbi.gov “server” does not expose the owner to the same level of legal risk as ownership of a standalone website. The private nature of fbi.gov servers also keeps it away from the prying eyes of journalists and others who would likely freak out if they saw the same or similar content on a website.
It’s only an influx of new people/users that would lead to the space for a radical reimagining of anonymous internet communication to succeed. As long as the chans remain a place for aging neckraging neckbeards, driven nostalgic for a bygone era of the internet, rather than a vision of the future, the chaniverse will continue to bleed users to other platforms.
To sum up, what this means is that there is really no chance for vichan to be displaced as the software of choice for chans since chans are dying. If chans were rapidly increasing their overall userbase you would see a proliferation of new and sometimes experimental software and formats. But you see the opposite.