Nanochan

Old Nanochan homepage.

Nanochan was an anonymous imageboard only accessible via Tor. Originating as a hobby project from 8chan in 2018, Nanochan grew to be the largest of its kind. It went offline after internal strife and neglect by the admin, and was last seen online in November 2022.

TLS information

HTTPS was recommended as it allows your browser to use HTTP/2. The SHA256 TLS fingerprint for the current (Sun 20 Feb 2022 09:43:49 AM UTC) v3 address was:

41:E2:7B:BE:85:06:15:B0:B3:AB:CE:D5:38:33:78:7A: E5:B2:7A:79:0E:B1:38:AA:85:1C:95:5B:7F:DC:33:C2

Boards

Like any other imageboard, Nanochan had a selection of boards its users could post on. Board creation was restricted to the admin instead of having a user board creation system. In its earlier days, moderators also commonly had their privileges restricted by board. Before it went offline, Nanochan had 9 boards: /b/ - Random, /l/ - The Lounge, /g/ - Technology, /meta/ - Board Meta, /pol/ - Politically Incorrect (hidden and with posting disabled), /a/ - Anime & Manga, /v/ - Video Games, /oc/ - Original Content, and /ar/ - Archive. /o/ and /k/ boards also existed at one point, but were ultimately deleted.

Tvol/gvol system

Nanochan's moderation was relatively complex. Instead of being given full access to site controls, volunteer moderators would begin as "trial volunteers" who could hide posts but not permanently delete them. This feature was added under sakamato's administration. More privileged "global volunteers" could permanently remove the posts. Trial volunteer and global volunteer were commonly referred to as tvol and gvol respectively. Nanochan's moderation log was also publicly viewable, which was intended to be an audit mechanism. Permanently deleted posts were recorded in a large text file known as the "audit.log".

Multiple threads were made on /meta/ to recruit volunteers (meta/3507, meta/7033, meta/27051). Among other things, potential volunteers were asked to post their PGP public key and a name of their liking. The PGP key would then be used to send them their passwords. IRC chatrooms were also used for communications.

History

Inception

Nanochan was created in October 2018 by a user known as "hakase" and advertised on 8chan /tech/ (first thread, second thread). At that time, the imageboard software was a very small script written in Lua. The codebase was praised by the userbase for being relatively feature-rich yet simple in design, while not requiring any JavaScript and being accessible through Tor.

In the subsequent days more is revealed of the reasons behind hakase creating nanochan. It seems that he created it because he was unhappy with 8chan /pol/'s lenient moderation. Despite this, a /pol/ board gets created without attracting many people, since many 8/pol/ users were skeptical of Tor. Instead, many came from 8/tech/, attracted by the minimal design. It was also shilled at mewch.

A culture of avatarfagging (the act of marking your posts with an avatar, a bannable offense on 4chan) began increasing during May to March of 2019. The 4 prevalent avatarfags were umarufag, asukafag, starfag, and lainfag. Asukafag began gaining infamy due to common thread derailing, hapa propaganda, and attacking other users. He claims to be the one responsible for the "HAPAS ARE SUPERIOR TO WHITES" spam on 8chan that resulted in many boards imposing restrictions on posting from Tor. Hakase refused to do anything about avatarfagging and /o/ and /k/ were created. Due to hakase being late to move asukafag threads and the fact that one of asukafag's livestreams showed hakase's original email in his email client (among other things), it is believed by many that hakase and asukafag were the same person.

In November 2018, the site experienced heavy automated spam. After failing to find a suitable CAPTCHA, the site was taken down. Umarufag was added as a gvol, but resigned after bullying. Slowly, new features were added such as an overboard, a floating post window, and support for more filetypes.

Under sakamoto

In May 2019, hakase announced his retirement, stating he was "no longer interested in hosting this pile of flaming garbage any longer, the software is too shitty and I've made too many irreversible mistakes in moderation and administration". The site was then handed over to its second administrator, who in June 2019 would name himself sakamoto. In August 2019 the deplatforming of 8chan would cause significant spill over, especially from 8/pol/. The influx of refugees caused post quality to drop and general spam. Eventually sakamoto hid /pol/ from public view, but it was still kept accessible with a direct link.

From September 2019 to the end of October 2019 tensions between asukafag and the moderation rose, with asukafag copying threads from 4chan onto Nanochan and otherwise spamming Nanochan. He was declared banned, but in reality the strict enforcement of this ban (which entailed deleting any post that mentioned hapas) was difficult, with many innocent posters getting caught in the crossfire. Sometime during November to December, asukafag started a nanochan clone running picochan called nanochang, which is no longer around.

Under endofunctor

In December 2019, sakamoto passed the admin position to endofunctor, who was a global volunteer up until then. Endofunctor rewrote most of the site's code in C++, except for the moderation tools, which were left dependent on the old Lua version. He also promised a Rust rewrite that never got finished, but angered asukafag. Endofunctor claimed to have lost the password to the server with the code leaving the server in a "living dead state" without the ability to make changes. This issue was resolved when Nyanonymous convinced endofunctor to rent a new server and a redirect was set up.

As time passed, endofunctor became less involved with the imageboard he was running. With endofunctor's increasing neglect, the site began experiencing frequent downtime. An issue that would plague the site until its demise was running out of disk space, which could sometimes be corrected by moderators deleting stale files. In May 2020, the moderator Nyanonymous announced he would no longer be enforcing the quality rules on /l/. Although likely a good decision, this set a precedent that moderators could ignore site policies and implement their own. In early June of 2020 /oc/ got created, but activity soon died out. However, it is one of the few boards to have a surviving Youtube video: /watch?v=7XofAvOXMK8 .

Decline and death

In nanochan's final years, endofunctor left the site in a semi-abandoned state. In addition, the site suffered frequent denial of service attacks, which endofunctor was slow to mediate. As a result, the site suffered frequent downtime, which could last months at a time. The years 2021 and 2022 saw the creation of multiple spinoff sites, including lambdaplusjs, phichannel, and nanochanray (see the Spinoffs section).

In November 2021, endofunctor disabled the site's /pol/ board. It could still be viewed through a direct link, but could not be posted on. The reason is vague, but /pol/ had been subject to an increasing torrent of posts by a user known as "/pol/ schizo" who would samefag threads about killing his enemies' children. Endofunctor would follow this by making extensive changes to the site rules, adding stuff about hate speech, changing the rules into "guidelines," and making the only rule "cancer will be purged."

In August 2021, a trial volunteer with limited privileges named hikari was added to the moderation team. He was a particularly active moderator, and began disregarding any rules and moderating as he saw fit. Attempts to correct his behavior resulted in disputes and sometimes revert wars. Eventually, endofunctor told him to stop deleting complaints about himself on the /meta/ board; hikari ignored this, and endofunctor disabled his account. He would return again under the name of flandre, and after this account was disabled by Yuki (a global volunteer). He continued to moderate using the higher-privileged "shio" account, formerly controlled by hoshi/kaimu (another global volunteer), and before that by lolipantsu (a poster who uses junior idols as his avatar), whose password had been given to him as a backup since few people were interested in moderating the site by that point. After about two months of drama, hoshi came back and used the shio account to nuke the Global Meta Thread, which prompted endofunctor to finally cut off hikari's access for the final time. At around the same time (in September 2022), however, nanochan's moderation functions ceased working, meaning that the efforts of any other moderator to preserve the site by deleting old files could not continue. The site became increasingly nonfunctional due to endofunctor's absence, and was last seen partly operational in November 2022.

Rules

These were the Nanochan rules as of Sun 20 Feb 2022 09:43:49 AM UTC:

1. Cancer will be purged.

These were the Nanochan guidelines as of Sun 20 Feb 2022 09:43:49 AM UTC:

1. Child pornography is not permitted. Links to child pornography are not permitted either, and neither are links to websites which contain a significant number of direct links to CP.
2. Flooding is not permitted. We define flooding as posting similar posts more than 3 times per hour, making a thread on a topic for which a thread already exists, or posting in such a way that it significantly changes the composition of a board. Common sense will be utilized.
3. Usage of outside memes such as pepes or wojacks is prohibited. Common sense will be utilized.
4. 3DPD porn is prohibited.

These guidelines apply to all boards on nanochan except /b/ and /l/.

1. Hate towards who people are (such as racism or sexism) or what people are attracted to is prohibited.
2. Discussion of political topics is prohibited. Common sense will be utilized.
3. NSFW thread icons are prohibited.

Individual boards may set their own rules which apply to that board, and boards which do not specify their own rules typically follow the board-specific rules of /l/. However, note that the rules stated above apply to everything done on the website.

External links

• Original v3 onion (dead)
• Bunker on Endchan (clearnet) (Lokinet), admin endorsed [1]
• History of Nanochan (up to August 2020) (clearnet) (Lokinet)
• Thread advertising nanochan on 8chan
• Second nanochan thread on 8chan
• Database as of 22 Nov 2022 (I2P) (Yggdrasil)

Spinoffs

Many spinoffs of nanochan have been created over its lifetime. The sites which are still alive include:

• Lambdaplusjs - Has a /tech/ board, a less active /math/, and miscellaneous blogging threads. Users can create boards, but moderation is decided by the admin and recruited moderators (there have been 7 accounts created/5 ever used. Several of them being former members of Nanochan). The site is currently active, averaging over 100 PPD^{(January 2024)}. The site uses its own codebase written in Lua. Refer to their wiki page for links and more information.
• Nanochanray - Unofficial nanochan clone created in May 2022 during an extended nanochan downtime with a copy of the original site's posts up to that point, in an apparent attempt to save the community from endofunctor's incompetence. Unfortunately the nanochanray admin practiced overly aggressive moderation and dishonesty with users. For example, he gaslighted users with falsified moderation logs by rolling back the database to remove posts without adding them to the logs. [2] Numerous wordfilters, including the admin's suspected former moniker "hikari", trigger fake connection errors. Unlike the original nanochan, nanochanray neither publishes its source code nor its database. The admin of nanochanray claims to have been a part of the original nanochan's moderation team, but has refused to offer proof, which he could easily provide with a PGP signed post. He continuously attempts to rewrite history to make his clone appear as the "official" continuation of the original nanochan, including edit warring on this wiki page. He has accompanied his edits with threats to "attack" lambdaplusjs, which were followed by child porn spam on the site.
• Aoichan is yet another nanochan-clone running the picochan fork of nanochan's software. As of writing this, not much is known about it. Time will probably tell.

Former spinoffs

Spinoffs of nanochan which existed in the past but are now dead include:

• Nanochang and Hapachan - Created by asukafag , these boards used his fork of nanochan known as picochan. As of November 2023, no one has posted these imageboards' databases or any other archives of them.
• The Ethnostate - One of the short-lived boards created by senafag, a poster using Sena from Haganai as an avatar. It was a private imageboard that could only be accessed if senafag gave you credentials to access the site. As of November 2023, there are no known archives of the site.
• Picochan - This site's most active boards were /tech/ and /pol/. It also featured boards for anime, art, retro and traditional games, and a bunker for the /fascist/ board which was often evicted from other sites. Its admin, known as neeshy, used asukafag's improved picochan software, but hostile to his ideology; thus he changed the "HAPAS ARE SUPERIOR TO WHITES" message in the source code to "HAPAS ARE MENTALLY ILL DEGENERATES." His imageboard banned promotion of racial egalitarianism, miscegenation, homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality, and pedophilia, as well as avatarfagging and blogposting. After shutting down the site, Neeshy posted the final version of its database in a thread on lambdaplusjs (I2P) (Yggdrasil).
• Phichannel - An imageboard written in Haskell. Home of Lynn's knitting blog, and other boards about computers, art, Monero, and books. As far as anyone knows, it hasn't been online since late March/early April of 2023. The most complete archive of it posted so far can be found on the Endchan bunker (clearnet) (Lokinet).
• Picochan 2 - A relatively short-lived imageboard created after Nanochan was already down for good. An archive of its posts can be found on Jeff Becker's personal website.
• Nanochan.moe (clearnet) - Nanochan-inspired imageboard launched on 2024-01-29. Not much was known about it other than the site running picochan and the admin (systemd) claiming to want to revive Nanochan. Used to have /b/, /g/, /meta/, /pol/, and /a/ boards. The last global guidelines that Nanochan had were its current stated rules.

Footnotes

[1] nanon ## Nanochan Administrator, /meta/3770/#post3768: "If the server goes down, I'll be around at the /nc/ board on endchan, or the thread on pigchan." endofunctor # Nanochan Administrator, /l/21579/#post21623: "Remember that there is a third party bunker at http://enxx3byspwsdo446jujc52ucy2pf5urdbhqw3kbsfhlfjwmbpj5smdad.onion/nc/ which I will read if this site goes down." Note that the third-party clone site nanochanray does not endorse the bunker (/othersites.txt on nanoray).

[2] Demonstrable examples can be found on archive.is: shitpost deleted (/b/122092) with nothing in log (/audit.log); in another case, metaposts rolled back (/b/122216). The site now blocks archive.is.

All nanochan posts referenced can be found in copies of its database.