Decentralization in Practice: The Fan.site Fork Story
By DeHub Team — 2023-07-03
In Q3 2023 a group of large, long-term DeHub holders forked the DeHub app to target the adult market. The project was BJ, now fan.site.
This is the most direct test our decentralisation claims have faced, and it did not come from a hostile actor. It came from our own holders.
What actually happened
Holders with significant positions decided the technology should serve a market DeHub was not going to serve, forked the application, and built a separate product. DeHub stakers were allocated a portion of the fork's token supply through a partner airdrop.
We did not obstruct it. We transferred knowledge and provided technical support to the team building it.
Why not resist
The honest answer has two halves, and the first is the less flattering one: we could not have. Permissionless technology means nobody needs our approval to fork it. Any resistance would have been theatre, and it would have demonstrated that "decentralised" was a word we used rather than a property we had.
The second half is that we think separation was the right structure independently. Adult content on the main DeHub app would have created genuinely difficult problems around protecting children and the vulnerable, and around users of all faiths and none who do not want that content adjacent to theirs. Separate markets and separate communities is a better arrangement for everyone in it.
That was set out in the whitepaper before any of this happened, and the fork implemented it more cleanly than we could have.
How we handled the boundary
Deliberately, and with distance. Communications between the two communities were intentionally minimised. There is no cross-promotion. Anyone under 18, or uncomfortable with the adult market for any reason, was told plainly to close the page and wait for the next airdrop.
That is not squeamishness. It is the recognition that the two audiences overlap far less than the token structure implies, and that pretending otherwise serves neither.
What it demonstrated
Decentralisation is usually discussed as a technical property. In practice it is a governance one, and you only find out whether you have it when someone does something you did not authorise.
Somebody took our work, pointed it at a market we had declined, and distributed value to our holders for doing it. We supported them. That is either what the word means or the word means nothing.
What we built from it
Rather than treating it as a one-off, we wrote it down: a framework for future community-driven forks, so the next group does not have to negotiate the same ground from scratch.
The fork went on to raise $1,000,000 from VCs, launchpads and public sales in Q1 2024. It succeeded on its own terms, in a market we were never going to enter, using technology we built. We consider that a good outcome.
The question we get asked
Whether DeHub benefits financially from fan.site. It does not. It is a separate company with separate investors, and the $1,000,000 it raised in Q1 2024 went to that company, not to us.
What DeHub holders received was the airdrop, which was the arrangement stated up front.
People find this unsatisfying, on the reasonable grounds that we did the engineering work and someone else raised the money. The response is that this is what permissionless means when it is inconvenient. A fork you get paid for is a licensing deal. A fork you support and receive nothing from, because you cannot prevent it and think preventing it would be wrong, is the actual thing.