After Backpage: Where the Horny and the Hunted Built a New Room

The FBI shut down Backpage last week under FOSTA-SESTA—the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act—and the immediate consequence wasn’t what the legislation promised. Sex workers didn’t disappear. They just started looking for somewhere else to go. The new laws make American companies liable for what their users post, which sounds measured until you realize it mostly means the platforms that provided some visibility and relative safety to escorts and camgirls are now too scared to keep hosting them.

Twitter had been the obvious fallback—open enough, tolerant of explicit content, popular enough to function as an informal marketplace where you could at least see who you were dealing with. But Twitter has shareholders and advertisers and a PR department, and those things tend to make companies squeamish when the legal environment shifts. So people started looking for something that worked like Twitter but wasn’t beholden to anyone who could be leaned on.

What they found is Switter—a Mastodon-based instance built specifically for sex workers and the horny men orbiting them. Mastodon is federated and open-source: no corporate center, no advertising model, no terms-of-service team folding after a bad news cycle. Camgirls, escorts, and anyone else who wants to wave their genitals at the internet can do so without some venture-funded platform deciding the optics are inconvenient. It’s what the internet looked like before it got platforms—decentralized, ungovernable in the best sense, answerable to nobody but its own users.