built a rival to the world’s largest fanfiction platforms — alone, at 17, on a $5/mo droplet | obaid’s longer thoughts

co-authors: Obaid, Opus4.8

this post is an experiment in parallelizing the power of LLM research with telling my own story, something I've found surprisingly difficult to do. if this works (in terms of telling my story the way i want to), expect more

the narrative outside blocks is all mine, and within all Opus 4.8

Prologue

Since I was 7 years old, I’ve been an avid reader. When I look at how old kids are at 7 now it is hard to believe myself, but thankfully I do have the receipts which means I don’t end up gaslighting myself — stale digital records of torrented books and pixelated videos through Nokia handhelds and me reading as people shout, tables fall, and my little world (the home I knew) descends into chaos all around.

Of course, I was a technically savvy kid. At around the same age (I don’t remember when), there was an incident: somehow, I ended up changing the WiFi password of our network without knowing anything or ever remembering using the 192.168… local address. To this day, I don’t know how that was possible, but I have a backup in trusted, shared memory from my brother who still remembers pressing me on how I did that — the answer I had for him then is the same I would have now: I was just playing with the settings and I don’t know.

Later when my brother (CS major, top of his batch, and one of the first iOS developers at Venture Dive/Careem) got too busy, this meant the duties of managing our home’s technical admin naturally fell to me.

— Opus 4.8, jumping in to comment on the veracity of this<br>Git can't confirm the WiFi story, but it fits the rest of what the commits show. Whoever wrote these 298 commits learned by breaking things instead of reading the manual first. Deleting wp-includes one folder at a time just to see what would fall over is the same kind of thing a seven-year-old does messing with the router settings.

I was also devious: I remember using carefully placed mirrors to find people’s device passwords and secretly used them at night when no one could find out — having bounded creativity and strict parents will do that to you.

The same restrictions extended to books. The way I used to devour books grew from something initially supported into apparently serious concern. My book-reading time became limited, and so did the restrictions on their content. My mom didn’t understand it, and so she put a halt to it. To this day one of the principles I’ve derived for my life has an origin in learning of how harmful this is.

I remember when I borrowed a book from the son of a family friend, Alex Rider: Eagle Strike, my mom had my brother read it cover-to-cover and with a black marker erase all text that had anything to do with girl-to-boy interactions or “kissing”. I can’t tell you what it did to my psyche over the next 10 years, but I can tell you that extensive control extended far further.

I cried when I found out, not because of the censorship, that I was used to, but because I didn’t know I could explain the markings when giving it back. And my mother knew who I’d borrowed it from, so it was actually even more insane. I’m almost cracking up thinking about the absolute insanity of it now. Though in hindsight, that was probably for the better: at least someone from the outside had a window into this insanity.

This is sounding more like a confessional therapy session than it does a story about a fanfiction site, but perhaps that is the necessary prelude I’ve been wanting to put out all along.

I learned to torrent because of my obsession with books too. My mom used to take me to a used book stall in Hyderi, where the books were stacked taller than our height, no categorization, and prices were between Rs 100–400. Our monthly trip had a limit of 4 books per sibling, no more, and that, obviously, was not nearly enough for me.

I learned to torrent. I knew what it was because my siblings used to download the matriarch-approved flicks to put on show for the family, but the recipes for those were always gatekept. As anything as an early GenZ, I used the internet to find that recipe.

The books I downloaded were nearly always continuations of series I’d started but never found the full cycles for, and soon I remembered not to beg my mom to go to Liberty Books or ask for books I couldn’t find at the stalls. My reading had become all-digital.

I remember on our first-ever out-of-Karachi trip, to Islamabad, we stumbled into Saeed Book Bank and I found on the shelf the then newly-released finale of the Artemis Fowl series: The Last Guardian. I was hooked, but I knew to skim through for as long as we were there, and then quietly get up only to launch uTorrent the moment I got back home to Karachi.

Soon, that desire for continuation turned into something else: the discovery of fanfiction. A way to stay in denial about the stories that I’d learned had already ended.

My...