Infinity Next Development Group was an unincorporated entity created to facilitate the development of Infinity Next, a PHP-based rewrite of existing imageboard software specifically to cater to 8chan, at the time a thriving community.
Long story short, this did not succeed, in large parge due to Jim Watkins (owner of 8chan at that time) refusing to support the project unless the AGPL license was scrapped. AGPL was what the software was sold to the community under, so I was not sure such a thing was even legal. The software ultimately failed to deploy due to an issue with the CAPTCHA that was not identified until after I left.
I did try to establish an imageboard competitor to 8chan using the new software, called 16chan, which failed almost immediately due to lack of interest. Much later, after the death of 8chan, I tried to reboot the concept as 9chan. This was met with an insane amount of abuse traffic that I could not deal with even having several volunteers to handle 24/7 moderation coverage. In a month, despite my best efforts, I determined that it was not possible to host an imageboard in the current era without somehow whitelisting human traffic (i.e. accounts, ip ranges, no TOR) and automated tools to filter out CSAM.
I debated deleting this decade old graveyard of optimism for imageboards but I'm archiving it instead. I don't think there's anything of value here but I am against deleting things. I'm not sure if anyone will ever even read this.
Take it easy,
Joshua Moon
[email protected]