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Jokko The Supercharger, Owner of Clonapedia

Jokkobellsproutboy

06/09/2024 11:28 AM ·Spoilers

Contents of 2024-04-04-faq-with-arian-kordi.txt in the comments, a document Arian made on April 4, 2024 (5 years after Closedverse's shutdown), for anyone interested

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F.A.Q. With Arian Kordi!!!!! 🤪
Feel free to repost this wherever. I doubt this will get enough reach or be able to undo any damage done in the past half decade but, it is what it is.
If you have any more questions for me, you know where to reach me: [email protected]
TL;DR: Got my machines back in August 2023. They said they “didn’t find anything” on them and I got all of my computers back, including the one with the Closedverse database. Sadly I have no plans of releasing any databases, just wanted to provide closure.

Q: Did you get your computers back?
A: I did get my computers back, including the Closedverse server, in August 2023. I’ve been chasing the case ever since I turned 18 and it became my responsibility.

Q: Why did it take so long?
A: So before I turned 18 (2022), it was my parents’ responsibility to chase down the status of the case, and of course, I never dared to ask my dad about it ever since it happened. Ever!
By the end of 2022, I began the process of starting to ask for the machines back.

Q: How did you get them back?
Now, in 2022, pretty much all I did in the end was request a police report about it, near the end of the year. It took me a while to figure out what I had to do in order to get that since getting a police report for a juvenile is a little bit complicated and I had to drive for an hour straight, by myself.
I ended up getting a police report, which listed the investigator and a list of property. The property list had a legend which included “seized”, “destroyed”, “burnt”, “returned”, etc. and all of my property said seized, which was a good sign to proceed.
In early 2023 I called up the investigator who had a really positive attitude towards me. He explained that they were still waiting on another investigation pending, by my school (???)
I don’t know exactly what my school was looking for, but the reason they were is a story for another day.
After some back-and-forth, they let me come to their Evidence Unit and retrieve all of the machines, which we loaded into my brother’s friend’s truck and came home with.

Yeahs1

Q: Why did Closedverse die when your computers were taken?
I used to host on the cloud for a long time, and I’ve used them all - AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, and more. Around the time Indigo came out, the activity dropped significantly, and as you can imagine the majority of the userbase stopped using the site.
Around this time I was also setting up a pretty nice home server, so I thought to self-host the site, which I have done on occasion, moving back and forth between home and cloud.
Closedverse was definitely self hosted from October 2018 to April 2019. Naturally, I didn’t keep backups, or at least, off-site backups. I made it a habit to manually back up by hand, though at this time I wanted my data storage to become independent, storing everything on the home server and nowhere else. That’s why when I lost it, I lost everything, and the site immediately went down.
I was able to hand over control of the domain to PF2M because there were other computers I could use, though.

Q: Why did they agree to let you have your machines back?
First of all, they kept them for as long as they did without destroying them, probably because not enough time had passed. According to the police report, in early 2020 the case had become inactive, and by late 2021 they were needed for the aforementioned school thing, and by early 2023 they were just finishing up with that and I was asking for them back. With that timeline, there really wasn’t enough time in between for them to justify throwing them away.
Now, before everything had become conclusive, I had talked to a lady on the phone who told me that most cases “of this nature” require the devices to be wiped before they can be returned and implied that my machines may have needed to be wiped.
However, another lady who I talked to later on, actually told me that they didn’t need that, that they “didn’t find anything”. I didn’t have to sign anything special to get them back either, just a confirmation that they were checked out.
From this, we can infer that they didn’t find anything illegal on my computers, or Closedverse.

Yeahs1

Q: Are there any catches, did they give you everything?
They sure gave me everything, I didn’t notice if they missed any major things. I had a lot of ThinkPads and desktops that I was collecting just because, but there were also lots of SD cards and flash drives. I have noticed a couple of things, like how there’s a Gateway 3DS flash cart in the property sheet that I didn’t get back 🙄.
I looked at all of the hard drives I got back. In fact, I imaged all of them beforehand, and looked at modification dates.
They actually didn’t modify anything on any drive, for the exception of one, which had seemingly been mounted on someone’s computer in December 2019 and then their computer removed some viruses from the drive, lol.
But yes, pretty much everything I remember being there is there. All of the databases, codebases, archives, my iPhone photo collection…

Q: Did any other legal action happen to you?
Not really, or at least not formally. Nope! I don’t even think this is on my record, I’ve went through background checks before.

Q: How did your parents feel about everything?
I think most would assume that in such a situation, your parents would go total apesh*t and take away everything you own and everything you love, if not disown you. Well, my dad went through a similar period I did, of just, nonstop stress for a few days before cooling down and stopping caring. He didn’t actually take away my ability to use the Internet or anything, anyone who talked to me on 4/4/2019 can vouch I used my mom’s iPad Air to use Discord. (My mom didn’t care or even know by the way)
My dad loves to blame his problems on others and would forever use this one time mistake as something to blame me for RUINING HIS LIFE!!!!!!!!! over, for years to come. It’s one of The Incidents(tm) to us, but, he didn’t go too far to punish me or anything.
The most he did was remove my door, but I actually got used to it and I’m sure he did this to prove something to the non-existent jury to the non-existent court case that never materialized out of this.

Yeahs1

Q: Give us a summary of what’s notably now Found Media.
* All of archive.ariankordi.net, yay. By this point there’s some stuff I’ve held back, mostly stuff outside of Aarch that wasn’t supposed to be public. OOPS! For those who aren’t familiar, these are my collection of Miiverse archives that I did release a few weeks ago.

* The source of closed.pizza, with more features than the GitHub version (closedverse-video-support is catching up but still doesn’t have everything)
* All versions of my old websites, including “The Mii thing” from various points in time, and all Closedverse downage pages. Remember those?
* An unfinished “Closedverse Archive” little web app that I intended to finish and properly close Closedverse with. Similar to Miiverse’s archive, but far more polished and in depth.
* Prototypes of new Miiverse clones that literally don’t have anything more than a login page, maybe even a community listing. I’ll include “Cedar 2” in this, which I wanted to make in 2017 with Sails.js, a framework aiming to be “Django but JavaScript”.
* Multiple forks of Cedar and Openverse. They should have changes, but the real question is if I care enough to see what they are. I know there’s certainly a version of Openverse with a dark mode that inspired Closedverse. I don’t think there’s a version of Grape here profoundly better than the GitHub version.
* Openverse^2, a quite innovative Miiverse clone that’s meant to be compatible with Openverse databases and its interface. It’s a single page app in Vue.js, is written in Golang, and was made in March or April of 2018, don’t have the exact date stamps. Most importantly, it had live posting with WebSockets. A lot of aspects of this inspired Indigo, which actually copies the exact style of the upload button that Openverse^2 first had.
* Projects that never got anywhere. Una, CheesecakeMaker (a web text editor I wanted to use at school to work on the next Miiverse clone with, that has a full file browser 🥺), and like, 4 prototypes for the next Miiverse clone. Probably at least 3 attempts to rewrite Closedverse too. Don’t worry, they are literally useless and stuck at step 1.

Yeahs1

* Database backups for: Closedverse (& dev server), Cedar (FULL! without anonymization), Indigo dev source and DB (sadly I think one or the other was accidentally deleted by me at some point), Indigo prod incremental backups
* … Probably more.

Q: Anything else you found unrelated to Miiverse/clones? I mean, yeah. I had backups of all of my machines from 2015 onwards, and Skype archives, and...
Honestly, I haven’t had enough time to take a deep dive into it.
I hate to say it, but I can’t give a great answer to this.
I do enjoy having old iPhone photo albums from before this time, however the moment I noticed there was a big gap between late 2017 and early 2019, I don’t know, it kind of made my mood about it fall.
There’s some gaps in my archives, such as the fact that I copied a lot of files using the Linux copy command without preserving dates, and the fact that a lot of my files now don’t have proper timestamps, it really ruins some of my feelings about them.
Now in terms of hardware, I had lots of old ThinkPads, but, at this point, I don’t even see them as anything special. The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve wanted to play with the new stuff rather than the old stuff. The newest ThinkPads here are Intel Nehalem laptops, and not only have ThinkPads become so much more cliche from that time to now, but I can’t see it as any more than old hardware.
I also had a Chromebook with Coreboot (also put it on an x60 but reverted it for some reason). I used to be all over that combination, since I thought Chromebooks are so light and efficient and Coreboot is so cool… but, at this point I’ve taken the “you will never have open source firmware and if you want it you have to spend like thousands of dollars on a specialized kind of product just for it” black pill, and binge bought an ARM Windows laptop at some point. I’m fine.
Then there’s my home server, with an i5-6500 and 32 GB of RAM. Is it nice? Sure, but at this point, I’d rather take a more efficient computer than a more powerful one. 🤷.  Not like I’m hosting a website anymore that would justify that amount of power anyway.

Yeahs1

Q: What do you think?
Personally I kind of looked at all of the stuff, went on a nostalgia trip, aaand kind of lost interest in looking at everything, pretty shortly.
Even the project I knew was farthest along, Openverse^2, is still a skeleton of what a Miiverse clone should be. There’s probably some good code in it and all other projects, but… the fact of the matter is that it’s all using libraries and versions from 2019, and plenty has changed since then. Probably the biggest disappointment has to be the fact that Closedverse’s database is mostly rendered useless by the lack of images. More on that to follow.
Either I had a false perspective on what life would be like after I got my machines back, or it’s really hard to satisfy me, I’m most likely just taking everything I’ve seen for granted.
Since uhhh my entire life 2015 onwards is oriented towards Miiverse, a literal dead service that people care less and less about with each coming year, I just get the feeling that everything I’m looking at is irrelevant, and its ship has sailed.
For the most part, it really was better to push forward without looking back.

Q: Will Closedverse return?
NOPE!
I wouldn’t discount any chances of rehosting the database for a single day as a joke, or letting users access their own archives, maybe kinda sorta not really…
…but Closedverse as we knew it is permanently dead.
Staying dead is the right thing for the site, not to mention I’m sure literally everyone who used the site stopped caring and the only ones who do care either never used the site to begin with or didn’t use it enough.
With all that being said, the fatal flaw is that all of the images in the database, each and every single one, has been erased, forever, and it has been like that for a few years now. This happened in 2020 and there was nothing I could’ve done about it. The database without images, it takes a lot of the fun away from it.
It may be possible to scour only some of the images from archives and the WayBack Machine, but, thing is that I went out of my way to block archive.org near the end of Closedverse’s life and I highly doubt that any dump has remotely enough content.

Yeahs1

Miiverse clones were never very archiveable in the first place since viewing any posts past the first 50 in a community required JavaScript to run. That’s my theory, though.
Does anyone who used the site even WANT it to come back? I certainly don’t, I struggle to think of people who would even know their username and password after 5 whole years or even more of dormancy.
None of this is even bringing up what happened with the closed.pizza domain. I don’t think I’ll ever have it back. And, honestly, learning that has damaged my morale for most ideas I had.

Q: What happened to the closed.pizza domain?
Since closed.pizza’s closure, as one would imagine, the domain switched owners from time to time. I was still the owner of the domain itself (even if I wasn’t the owner of the site) until October 2019.
In January of 2020, someone bought it, and it eventually got transferred to PF2M, where he bought it for a few years until it expired in 2022.
… That’s when the nightmare began. After that point, some motherf*cking *ssholes named EDOMS scalped the domain and won’t sell it back to me for any less than $500. Would you pay that? That’s barely more than I made in ad revenue for the entire lifetime of the site, roughly $670.
Don’t worry, that fact isn’t worth much since my dad, who effectively forced me to implement ads, in a conversation that ended with my brother inviting me to his basement to code the ad functionality with him before he had to leave and literally left me there where I got it implemented after that *ss hole left, 😡😡😡, my DAD is the one who pocketed all of the money. Sure he paid my bills, only if I asked him really nicely, but he made more than twice as much as all of the site costs. Sigh…

Q: What happened to the images on the site?
Just like cloud providers, Closedverse has switched and swapped around image hosts, transitioning between Cloudinary and self-hosting. And, what we ended on, was Cloudinary.

Yeahs1

I don’t think I had a bad reason to do this, as in my opinion, self-hosting is mostly limited by your Internet connection, and like most of the US I was stuck on a sh*tty DOCSIS uplink with 12Mbps upload speed, and didn’t feel that I could self-host images with that kind of speed. Hence, use Cloudinary and Cloudflare to lift most of the bandwidth requirement away.
The problem with this is that we never actually paid for Cloudinary. In fact, at some point I made a script to literally automatically create Cloudinary trial accounts, and then swap through them as they kept getting banned, like whack-a-mole. Cedar did this too, since they never actually deleted the images. Well…
PF2M discovered in mid-2020 that Cloudinary had suddenly started DELETING alllllllll images from such unpaid trial accounts, like what he had been using on banama.club. Needless to say, this was really devastating to hear about.
In August of 2023 when I was still getting everything back, I decided to host the Closedverse site on my machine. Occasionally, a handful of images would show up, but only on my phone and nowhere else, and not just any images, they had to be recent. I couldn’t get this to happen when I tried it earlier today.

Q: What now? The logical next step, other than what I’m going to do with all of the personal data, would be to share the love and release some of the Miiverse and clone related stuff I got back, right?
* I should release Openverse^2, but it never had version control for some reason, so I have to aggregate different versions and make fake Git commits for them so you can see it over time. If enough people ask me to do this, I’ll go ahead and dedicate a few days to it.
* Likewise for any of my Cedar and Openverse forks.
* I can also release the closed.pizza source, after stripping sensitive information from it…
* Oh, I should really release the Closedverse archive source, too…
… All of this depends on how much time, I hate to say that I don’t care enough to have an immediate urge to release any of this. As always, please let me know what you think, though.

Yeahs1

In all other aspects, I think I will push forward with my post-4/4/2019 life rather than my pre-4/4/2019 life. :)

Now, personally, it’s a big weight off my shoulders to finally move on from having all of this data lost to time.
4/4/2019 was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and depending on how you look at it, that’s not as bad as it seems, like at least I didn’t lose an arm or anything.
It’s created a hard split in my life pre-4/4/2019 and post-4/4/2019, though, that could be due to the way I see it.
I did lose everything I was working on, but in hindsight, I mean it wasn’t MUCH that I lost…
A sense of direction? Did I even have that to begin with? 😂?

Q: Where have you been?
I’ve been seen as being dead by the vast public in the last years, though really, that comes down to public perception of what being dead means, which obviously just means not being online, which REALLY means not having a platform to express myself.
What I’m trying to say is that I haven’t really been dead as much as I’ve been distancing myself from the name Arian Kordi, as well as any Miiverse clones and communities surrounding.
I moved my Twitter to a more secretive account in 2019, I left most Discord servers in 2019, and with my biggest platform gone, Closedverse, yeah I would never blame people for concluding that Arian Kordi Disappeared!

With that being said, I’ve just tried to finish high school up until 2022 before shortly afterwards getting a job. I haven’t picked up any huge projects, yet..
Most of what I’ve worked on is just varied stuff. I should really write a blog about it, there’s some semi-cool bits and bobs 😔 Chances are, I will publish whatever I’m doing if it’s code related to my GitHub or GitHub Gist at some point, e.g.: my Splatoon Kindle project, uhhhh that’s all I can think of,

Yeahs1

Q: What is your opinion on Miiverse clones? Will you make another Miiverse clone?
I don’t have much to say on this, other than a few things. I think most of what should be said about clones has already been said by PF2M on occasion.
The current state of Miiverse clones are mixed, definitely not ideal. We still have not reached the ultimate endgame of a clone that supports the Web, API, Wii U, AND 3DS just like Miiverse did. At best, pick two.
I don’t think it would be wrong to say that Miiverse clones had their time and are now seen as mediocre to those who already experienced them.

For a while I have wanted to write a clone along with PF2M that actually covers all of Miiverse, as well as just being a magnum opus for what I’d like to see in a web app.
At this point, a Miiverse clone is such a stale idea, and yeah, I don’t know if I can see myself working on one for a long period of time, that’s without even mentioning my inability to complete any projects.

Personal Vent!!!
I was always planning much more leading up to today. Every single time I think about getting out my camera to film something. There’s nothing stopping me as I’ve got a tripod, green screen, and wall ready but every time I think about recording the insecurities come into play, not even getting into that my parents probably don’t want me to make much noise in my room. Even when they weren’t home, I wasn’t able to speak without stuttering and a feeling of anxiety. The only deadline that would’ve been funny enough to make is far gone now. Sigh… I’ve always wanted to bring out the inner filmmaker of myself but there’s far too many barriers and my head seemingly never wants to make any idea come to life. That’s what taking film classes in high school was supposed to solve for me, but the moment we got any semblance of the ability to make videos on our own topics, 2020 hit and instantly completely ruined that dream. I hope my AD4K diagnosis soon helps with stuff like this. And a video would’ve been the best way to present this information. 😔. At least I didn’t even really promise anything?

Yeahs1

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