nutmeg.gay has shut down, thanks for posting

Hi, this is Lynn. I’m your cybersecurity communicator, and jaded former deep learning / “artificial intelligence” expert, and friendly local sysadmin who ran Nutmeg.gay.

Nutmeg.gay soft-launched March 7th, 2025, and officially launched June 21st later that year.

The goal was to provide a free, non-corporate online community space, especially for New Haven, for Connecticut, and for the greater New England area.

Young, queer, and activist communities are beholden to the whims of increasingly fascistic technological megacorporations.

The goal was to provide a small social-media alternative to the technological megacorporations that control our social networks. Meta gave us Trump and committed genocides in Myanmar. TikTok cozied up to Trump. X is full of nazis. They’re all using AI-curated feeds running on transformers (the same neural architectures as LLMs) while radicalizing our communities to the far right and silencing our voices.

On March 6th, 2026, I announced that Nutmeg.gay would shut down, citing a maintenance burden. It costs money to keep the site up and time to keep the server secure, and we simply didn’t have enough users or activity to justify the time.

AI scrapers have always been a problem for our site, but since May, we faced another, new burden. LLMs greatly reduced the turnaround time for reverse engineering exploits from patches (both source and binary), and are also being utilized to create novel attacks in the first place. In the past two weeks alone, we saw numerous Linux LPEs (copyfail, dirtyfrag which was patched in the mailing list and immediately reverse-engineered and released early as copy-fail2, and Fragnasia).

Side note: We saw several serious Windows, macOS, iOS, BSD, etc. exploits in this time too. None of that is relevant to the tech stack which nutmeg.gay ran on.

But the exploit that motivated this early shutdown was Nginx Rift, which could have let a hacker take control of my server at any time through the Nginx server in the Docker container which Nutmeg.gay ran on. Rather than muck around with docker-compose and try to get the patched Nginx into production, I decided to cut my losses early.

So, on May 14th, I decided to shut down the site early. We had 36 users, 58 submissions, and 67 comments.

I want to thank the dozens of people who gave Nutmeg.gay a shot. Don’t give up on small social media. It’s an important and good thing. Sorry for not promoting Nutmeg.gay more.

But there is something YOU can do. Here are some resources for digital sovereignty which might interest you. These are things which I can recommend to anybody.

• Neocities provides a friendly environment with tutorials for writing your own websites using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• GrapheneOS provides a hardened Android OS for Google Pixel phones and is the standard in security and privacy. With WebUSB, you can wipe your Google Pixel and install GrapheneOS in the browser.
• The “Surveillance Self Defense” guide from the EFF is a great starting point for anyone looking to improve their digital privacy and security, both online and in person.
• Signal is the gold-standard end-to-end encrypted messaging app. This is the app recommended by every security and cryptography expert.
• Bit Chat is a new peer-to-peer location based messaging app which runs on Bluetooth with end-to-end encrypted DMs. This means that, if a disaster causes the internet to shut down, you can still message people with smartphones within your radius. Download it now, use it in the event of an emergency.
• Ghost is an open source, self-hostable (with optionally paid hosting), and optionally federated blog / newsletter. It’s a better alternative to Substack, Medium, or Wordpress, and is used by Real Journalists like 404Media. Ghost is good.
• Linux is the free-and-open source OS that will let you escape Microsoft’s bullshit. It’s much better over here. Two of the best options are Linux Mint or Fedora Linux.
• If you’re hosting your own web servers, I absolutely love Caddy, and it has replaced Nginx and Apache in every context (except for apps which come in containers, like Postmill, the software which Nutmeg.gay ran on.)

For those writing code, Microsoft is increasingly entering the extraction phase, while pushing AI in all of their products, as they get worse. Unfortunately, Microsoft also runs GitHub and VS Code, which are considered standard among devs. - Instead of GitHub, consider using Codeberg (or hosting your own Forgejo.) - Instead of VSCode, consider using Zed (evil but not as evil as VSCode), Gram (a new fork of Zed, less evil, but which I have not personally audited), or Kate (KDE’s code editor, which is good and has a high reputation).

Nowadays, I am working on a silly little Metroid homage game. You can also find some contact details for me in that link, if you don’t already have me on Signal or elsewhere.

Thank you for using Nutmeg.gay!

• Lynn