R: 3 / I: 3
So, I admit to be very, very late to the party when it comes to everything surrounding Lainchan. I think I heard about it around 2023, only really started browsing it at all around 2024, and only really got involved at all around the end of last year. I like it because it's got a good collection of interesting resources and higher-quality discussion than most other places on the internet.
However, I've also noticed that other users often complain that it's not as good as it used to be. This itself is not unusual, as internet communities tend to degrade over time as old users who understood the original purpose of the place go inactive and are replaced by nusers that have a more superficial understanding of the culture take their place, if indeed they are replaced at all. However, what I found curious is that despite being founded in 2014, there are no threads available before 2017.
From what I can gather, there was some kind of drama where Kalyx sold the rights to the original site and appointed a controversial mod, leading to the establishment of the original Arisuchan in an attempt to placate the original members. I assume that the first iteration of this site was shelved simply due to inactivity and the inability of the original owners to maintain it, though correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, this site very helpfully links to a complete archive of the original place, which in turn alerted me to what I presume was a very similar archive site of Lainchan circa 2014-2017. However, upon entering, I was redirected to another place called Miladychan, which wouldn't even allow me to enter with a VPN. I found this strange, but at the time I was willing to attribute it to simple link rot or something along those lines.
However, I've lately been trying to find more archives of old Lainchan, and I have found some, such as on the internet archive and individually archived threads on other sites. These are better than nothing, but they don't really give me the sense of the old site that I'm looking for, & they don't really allow me to save or view any files that catch my eye. Out of desperation, I looked up lainchan.jp on the wayback machine, & got redirected to miladychan again. I don't mean that it only had snapshots of miladychan available. I mean I got redirected to the site itself. I don't think I've ever seen anything like this before, which got alarm bells ringing in my head.
At this point I decided to do a bit of light digging, and was reminded of the whole Milady thing that I should have picked up on from the start. While I had vaguely heard of them before, I basically took them for a group that managed to pull off the NFT grift better than most, and took little interest in them beyond that. After that, I did discover their founder, who goes by Charolette Fang, does have some links to the wider Lain community, apparently being involved with the whole Systemspace thing for a little while, which is its own can of worms I won't even look into for now. While at this point I can hardly provide any hard links between this guy and early Lainchan, I'm left wondering: is there some kind of deliberate effort to erase those early years, for whatever reason? And are there any more complete archives of the old site that I'm not aware of? Thanks for any help anyone can provide.
