Image was generated using Nano Banana 2.

Introduction

Before anyone panics, no, I'm not in Australia, so the national ban won't be applied to me. However, this and the other issues have made me write this article. It's not going to look good for this site.

Australia's Policies

So it looks like Australia is following UK's way of locking the internet and forcing its citizens to give their identification away in order to whether to allow them to enter adult sites. This has upset a growing amount of its citizens here (looking at recent articles), several of them who are big creators in the community.

Since Civitai is considered an adult site (or a site with adult content), and wants to stay that way, it will be blocked in that country. I don't know the percentage of users here who are Aussies, but I feel that a void will be created in several hours. The site will be emptier, like how UK's situation has happened. Despite ways to gain back access, some are afraid to get banned. There are also fears that more countries (or parts of a country) will do the same.

Site Being More Broken

Even if a chunk of the site's population will be wiped out, that doesn't fix the horrendous performance of the site. Like, the UK's ban did not improve the performance of the site. The October policy change did help a little bit, though not that significant. It feels that it gets more broken by the weeks, no matter what happens.

It has gotten to the point that images and videos don't show up on galleries, sometimes even on profiles. Users have complained about this for a while, but with no current fix at the time of writing this. I occasionally have this problem too, and not being able to see posts publicly defeats the purpose of sharing. No one wants to wait for hours for their stuff to become public, because when it does, it's buried by other posts, and since not everyone wants to scroll dozens of posts, some of them won't get as much views (and reactions) if any.

Wasn't there a job posting of Civitai wanting a technician to fix this mess up? Because they really need it, NOW.

Membership (not that I'll buy it, my creator score in the negative, so it won't make me money anyway) has been restricted to crypto payments. Most of the blame would have to be on the big credit card companies for Civitai to go into crypto. I know that some users here (including myself) are not fond with crypto, either due to the loss in value in the past several months or that the way it is advertised is too overhyped, but Civitai unfortunately does not have a choice at this point in time.

What's Next for Me?

I'll stay active here, but would do more lurking rather than creating. Don't get me wrong, I still like to see what checkpoints and LoRAs are being created/uploaded here (still considered the best platform for it). However, here isn't much of an incentive, for me at least, to do official challenges (I don't have time to generate 10 different, but decent images of the same theme). The big challenge relating to CivChan (did not participate that one) had controversies with how entries were rated, according to some folks. I still participate in bounties occasionally, but that incentive is declining as well. It's been two month since the number of yellow buzz has changed after hosting a bounty (not begging for yellow buzz, still have some left for reserve). With the site problems that I have stated before, even posting yields very few rewards, especially as a smaller creator with less than 200 followers (I'm aware that follower count doesn't fully matter, but still).

Moderation system has gotten worse. Two of my recent videos have been rated "X" despite being SFW. It might be due to the word, "come" that's causing it. ToS also hasn't been updated, so user can still get into trouble for violating the unwritten rules, which is annoying, and the cause of my negative creator score.

My plan is to make an account for e6ai. I have been thinking about it for many months, and have mentioned about this before, but I think it's better for me to do it now. Managing and trying to juggle between this site and e6ai will be a pain, but I feel that utility would be higher as people there would enjoy my content more than here despite having strict guidelines. Again, I'm not abandoning the site, but sticking to just one site currently isn't making me happy.

Conclusion

That is all for now. Thank you for reading this announcement, rant, concerns, or whatever you like to call it. Thoughts about anything related to the content, put them in the comment section below.