The web isn’t what it was before AI. We’ve seen it firsthand, and we figured there’s no other option than adapting to everything that’s been shaking the place up since 2022. On top of that problem, we need to free up time and money to focus on NovaLand, a project that’s well on track to happen sometime in 2027. So, after thinking it over, we spent the whole summer working hard to completely rebuild NovaFuture.
What’s changed in this new version?
We’re dropping the how-to sheets on ecological self-sufficiency completely. The reason is dead simple: it was a ton of work that always ended up looted by AI. We did start by putting a clear ban in the site’s robots.txt: no AI scraping, with the bots involved clearly named. It changed nothing! Then we wrote a PHP script to block AI bots. But they got around it by passing themselves off as run-of-the-mill SEO bots. We also set up a kind of subscription system to keep the content for members only. The result? That one got worked around too, with methods that come close to straight-up hacking. All that just to end up in an endless game of cat and mouse. So why bother? So AIs with zero life experience can guzzle information they don’t really understand and spit it back out wrong through their interface? No, enough is enough! That behavior is theft, plain and simple, plus disrespect and a massive hijacking of the site’s would-be visitors. But push your luck long enough and sooner or later the artificial intelligence companies are going to catch a nasty backlash right in the face!
The NovaFlow and NovaFeed services are shutting down completely too. They ate up time and a lot of server resources. So now we can move to a server that costs us way less every month. It makes the site easier to secure, because without member accounts everything gets a lot simpler. But that doesn’t mean interaction is gone completely. We’re just outsourcing it. If you want to talk to us, our social accounts are right there, mainly Mastodon and Bluesky.
We’re sorry for our German-speaking and Spanish-speaking friends, but translating into those two languages was a huge amount of work. Every piece in four languages, with no outside help, got too heavy to carry. So we’re narrowing the site down to English and French. Most of the time we write in French first, then translate into English. Our English isn’t 100% native level, but we do our best to get the translations as good as they can be, with several rounds of proofreading.
That’s the big stuff. Beyond that, a lot of things are gone. We also took the chance to end every web project in progress. Because once again, we have to focus on what we really care about and on what works.
So what’s left on this new version after all that deleting? NovaFuture doesn’t claim to be a free media outlet at all anymore. Big Tech and its flunkies do everything they can to make anything that really bothers them invisible. We’ve taken note and we’ve grieved that part of the work. Instead we’ll just keep going as a blog about what we’re doing and how we feel, moving at our own pace. The good news is that we kept the older long reads we liked best. Several hours of reading are still sitting on the site.
On the NovaBlog, we won’t stick to sharing copyleft long reads. We’ll also talk a lot about our writing, and above all about how the NovaLand project is coming along. We’re even thinking about a video format. We’ll figure out how to set that up later on.
Now for the big news. In the small team that created and runs NovaFuture, we’re all writers out of passion. Each of us with our own style and our own register. For a long time we’d badly needed to be free of the standard publishing circuit. So to get out of that pattern, we figured we could start NovaFuture Éditions and put our books out in a setting that fits us. Even if here too, it’s nowhere near as easy as it used to be. Because once again, the sharks running the AI companies came along and badly shook up the book business. But at least for now, at our scale, the horizon stays fairly clear. Sadly, beginning authors have it even harder than before. We’ll dig into that properly on the NovaBlog.
In the meantime, let’s be clear: no NovaFuture author has ever written a book thinking “I’m doing this to get rich and famous.” Truth is, we write above all because we love writing and because we love sharing ideas with our readers. As a bonus, our catalog will help us speed up the funding for NovaLand. That way everybody’s happy 🙂
What was hard about running the old NovaFuture?
It goes without saying, anybody who’s ever run an independent site has run into trolls. Or even into raids run by hordes of trolls. Fine, you can handle it. Especially with experience. But it’s a pain and it wears you down over time.
Plus everything that never shows. The time spent updating code, improving this or that function, tuning the server to whatever’s going on… Hours and hours of work. And alongside it, somebody has to keep the social accounts alive, since almost everyone has walked away from the traditional web and gone to microblogging with all its hard limits. What are people after on those unfriendly networks? Saving reading time? The feeling of getting their two minutes of fame by posting throwaway stuff that puts emotion ahead of substance? It stays a mystery to us.
And we’ve sounded the alarm about money more than once. Volunteering time to run and feed a free media outlet in English, French, German and Spanish, fine, that was our call. But circumstances forced us to do the math. Over two years of daily work: on one side $60 in total donations in the site’s tip jar, on the other more than $2,000 in expenses. Doesn’t take long to add up! Okay, we do libre. Okay, we like sharing. But at some point, if nobody backs you up and helps cover the running costs, it doesn’t hold. It’s flat-out demoralizing. And what shocks us most is that it’s a general trend. Every independent site and every piece of free software runs into it. Users think free = free of charge = costs nothing to make! Some of them even act like customers of a service they paid for. Does it happen now and then? No, it’s all the time! So, stop! Before all this, I’d never have thought independent sites and open source would have to start charging. But watching where this is going, with maintainers carrying projects on their backs, I figure that if people can’t give a minimum of support, then you make them chip in or you shut it all down. Because with no money you do nothing. Nothing at all.
What about the free software NovaFuture builds?
As for Peerbox and Notrak, we’ll keep updating them. The only change is that tech support now lives entirely on Github. We’ve already talked about the work it takes to keep a free media outlet alive. Now let’s talk about the huge work it takes to build free software. In real life that’s evenings, or even all-nighters, to ship something that actually holds up. All that just to end up hearing that coding is easy because GPT exists!!! Right, that famous GPT that craps out lines of some strange language the vibe coders don’t understand one bit. So if it means ending up lost in a repo full of thousands of turds cranked out by LLMs in the hands of people who can’t even grasp software architecture… we figure it’s better to stop. And if somebody wants to take over Peerbox and Notrak and look after them properly, we have no problem handing them over.
For the tech-minded
NovaFuture runs on a CMS called NovaPress. It’s really a very big in-house fork of WordPress, running plugins we developed 100% ourselves. Honestly, we liked WordPress in its early days. But bit by bit, the whole thing went downhill. The list of what’s screwed up is long: gaping security holes, bloated code, badly coded plugins that cost more and more, plugins and themes that break with every update… Not to mention that pitiful latest version juiced up with AI! That was all it took to finish turning everyone off.
The main differences between WordPress and NovaPress start with the airtight wall we put between the core and the plugins. We ripped out all the dead and obsolete code. We also rewrote a lot of core files and added plenty of optimizations. And of course we hardened security a lot. What comes out is the best of the original WordPress with big improvements. As for the plugins, they’re specific to NovaPress. At first we coded them because the commercial ones with those features were priced way too high and badly designed. Never mind how heavy commercial WordPress plugins are, padded out to justify their prohibitive price. Comparing ours to the licensed ones, we don’t regret a single hour spent building them. Because it’s big savings in time, in money and above all better security for the site.
The upsides of the old version
We’re not throwing the baby out with the bathwater 🙂 For two years, despite everything, we had a great time writing articles and how-to sheets for the site. We’re also really happy about all the friendly exchanges we had with people from all kinds of backgrounds. And we’re really pleased to see the site reached a very wide audience. But like they say, all good things come to an end. One page closes, another opens. This isn’t a death, it’s a reinvention.
So what happens now on NovaFuture?
Now that everything’s in place, we’ll regularly publish articles on the NovaBlog. And we’ll also regularly put out new books from NovaFuture Éditions. All our titles come in both paperback and ebook. On price, we think we’ve set them as fair as we could against the work it took to write and publish them. And we’ll say it again: 100% of the book sales go to funding our good causes.
Very soon you’ll also get to follow the whole NovaLand setup. Whether on the site or on our social accounts. But what matters most to us is focusing on concrete projects in real life. We have no time and no money to waste on virtual stuff. That’s why we’ll only post when something feels important enough to share. As for the rest, the fight against capitalism and its big techs goes on… In other forms, with other methods. We’ll have plenty of time to get back into it on the blog. Until then, see you very soon for new adventures. And as usual, for every new version of the site, we say goodbye with music 🙂
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