federiefederi (also known as "Your Lesser-Known Neighbors | F+F", or just "F+F") was a Neocities site started on October 23, 2023. Its main purpose was to bring attention to unknown, obscure, and low-view Neocities pages by featuring their buttons on the website's front page. At its peak, the site was able to reach the top 8th position on Neocities' most viewed websites, having 223,000+ views and over 1000+ followers. Sometime around April 16th-17th, F+F was deleted. It was banned off of Neocities. This came after days of drama and controversy surrounding the site.

F+F would find sites with low view counts on Neocities and comment on their profiles asking if they would be interested in being featured on F+F. To be featured on F+F's website, one had to follow their Neocities page. This rule led to rumours that the site was a follow-for-follow scheme. The accusations became more popular near the end of the site's life.

My Personal Experience

F+F contacted me around the end of February asking if I was interested in joining their project. They told me that they were dedicated to helping small Neocities sites gain a wider audience, and that to be featured on their site, I had to follow them. At the time, I thought to myself "Eh, what do I have to lose?" and joined their project. In preparation for this grand occasion, I decided to make an animated version of my button (gotta look good for the audience after all, no?). I also accidentally found myself on their front-and-centre featured projects section for a while, because I accidentally put an "application" for my site in their featured projects section post, that was pretty funny.

Truth be told, I never really gained much from being on their site, and I doubt other people did as well. My views still remained low after I was featured. I did find 1-2 sites to follow, but I mostly remember my feed on Neocities being full of posts from F+F's feed for a long time (at least they took action against that at some point). Also, they never followed my site back for some reason, despite the fact that they followed a lot of other people who did. I can best describe the situation in one sentence from a comment that was posted on their page, "they need us more than we need them".

Cracks Starting To Show

I believe one of the first things that began to alarm people was when F+F updated their site to be a Districts parody for April Fools Day. Districts, if you don't know, was a site similar to F+F, read more here. Some people began freaking out and throwing mean comments at F+F, essentially saying that they felt betrayed (I guess some people forgot that it was April Fools Day).

Some people began to become suspicious of F+F when they came out and said that they would unfollow everybody they ever followed. They said that they wanted to reach the top of Neocites so that new users would find their site and find other smaller sites. The reason for unfollowing everyone was because Neocities wouldn't let them get to the top with all the sites they followed, according to them. They also put out a poll a little while later, asking their followers if they would continue to support their project even if F+F randomly removed their button and cut off all contact with them without warning (I said I would stop supporting the project, but the majority opinion was YES, they would continue to support it).

The straw that broke the camel's back was a post F+F made over their policy. In it, they said:

"we permanently block anyone who: 1. leaves our project without saying a word, 2. is against our project or agrees with someone who is against it, 3. has let us know explicitly that doesn't want to be part of it. | we temporarily block anyone who: 1. we have let them know about our project but haven't got an answer for several weeks, despite them being active, 2. if we notice they don't want to be part of anything."

This was done because, according to them:

What Now?

While anything related to F+F's original Neocities page has been wiped completely, archives of the site still do exist up to and after it went offline. If you're interested, their Neocities domain was "https://federiefederi.neocities.org/", and the link to their Neocities page was "https://neocities.org/site/federiefederi".

There are also some remenants of F+F still lingering around the internet that haven't been wiped completely, as of now:

• I believe the website federiefederi.love is related to F+F. The HTML for the site only has a comment that says "there will be nothing here anymore, but we're gonna keep our domain till the end". The page federiefederi.love/home/ also exists on the site. Strangely, an archive for this website exists from September 2023, a month before the F+F Neocities page went up. According to who.is, the domain was registered in 2021. The domain expires in 2025.
• There is a federiefederi page on carrd.co, see it here.
• Every link on the carrd.co page links to Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, except the Ko-fi, which is a legitimate page.
• There is a Steam account that has "federiefederi" as their Steam ID. Their profile picture also has a similar artstyle to the artstyle that F+F had. Even their display name is "F+F". Archive
• Just searching up "federiefederi" on a search engine gets you a good handful of results. Mostly from people talking about them outside of Neocities.

(Apr 24, 2024) Someone claiming to be F+F has recently contacted me via email. I say "claims" because I never got 100% confirmation as to whether it was them or not, for all I know this could be an elaborate troll, but I'll just assume they're the real deal. I think it's an interesting personal tidbit of information that I should share with you. Below are the contents of the first email. Any grammatical errors were present in the original emails sent to me and emails I sent:

"we permanently block anyone who: 1. leaves our project without saying a word, 2. is against our project or agrees with someone who is against it, 3. has let us know explicitly that doesn't want to be part of it. | we temporarily block anyone who: 1. we have let them know about our project but haven't got an answer for several weeks, despite them being active, 2. if we notice they don't want to be part of anything."

then at least complete it with the reply that we posted below it which explains WHY we did that:

"the reason why we do this is not because 'we took it personal', we look almost every other day for sites sorted by last updated, in order for us to save us time and have more room for new sites to find and without getting the same sites every time, we block (permanently) the ones who don't want to be part of the project and (temporarily) who haven't made up their mind yet."

by the way, very nice of you to put all our links that you've found about us on a public space so stalkers and haters can find us... and talking about haters... we got our site delete by haters, I gave the link to Erin (chocolaterevel) and asked him for help, but all he gave us (and other people who read my message) was his sympathies.

Now... do we risk that you'll also public this message on your site against our will and tell everyone that we've contacted you? yes. do we care? no. would you do it? if you have put all our links about us then most likely you would do it. what would that tell us? that we were right about you and most people from the beginning. do you care? of course not, you just prove it by posting all our links.

Holy pancakes... working almost for 6 months for everyone but ourselves... and this is what we get... haters taken us down... and people who we've supported just looking and not helping... and me and my brother… me and my brother just watching higurashi no naku koro ni sotsu (I didn't like the ending)

Cake."

"Hello,

First and foremost, I have no idea if you are the real Federiefederi or simply an impostor, so some sort of confirmation would be great. For now, I'll just assume you are the real one. Secondly, please do not assume that I have any negative feelings towards you as a person, even if I was slightly critical of your project in some parts of my article. If it means anything to you, I quite enjoyed the illustrations you made for your site, if they were actually your own work that is.

I'll be happy to add that second quote you gave me if it gives my readers more context as to what happened during the final days of F+F's lifespan.

As for the links, all of the links I provided were accessed via searching your name on DuckDuckGo. All of them are publicly available for anyone to find. If you do really have stalkers and haters actively harassing you, it isn't and wasn't my intention to send them your way, and I condemn anyone who is harassing you. If you really, do truly fear for your own safety, I am open to removing the Steam link since that is the most personal, but remember that removing your Steam link from my site won't mean much when one can easily find it by just searching your name on any search engine.

I won't publish your message on my site for the next few days. If you don't confirm your identity, get back to me, or reject me publishing it, I will. I will not post your email address. If you want these messages to remain private, please tell me and I will respect your wishes.

Sincerely, Crackworth."

"Sorry for assuming but your actions say otherwise, I know that our nicknames and everything about us can be ducked it or googled it, but by writing on your site you're just making it more easy for people to find, specially the ones that have no clue on those things or just simply don't know how to properly search or just didn't care about it until they found our info on your site.

We don't fear stalkers haters or anything like that, it's just some (like my brother says) "basic privacy principles": you're not supposed to reveal messages that are only for you to others, you're not supposed to reveal all the info you got about someone to others even if it can't be searched, and you're not supposed to encourage this behavior, you even write your "google is evil" but you're doing no better, and now you're threatening us to reveal this message if we don't confirm our identity? holy pie in the sky! do whatever you want to do, at the end your actions will say enough about you.

By the way, we also found another person talking about us that clearly didn't read our Q&A and probably didn't even know that we had a "Featured Section" and not just the "Neighbors Wall", they even said we changed submissions to make people "fill out a form" when we've never used forms! then they get mad at us when we tell them "you guys don't read anything, do you?" hahaha, we took our time to look and check if their sites meet our basic rules, but they can't even go to our homepage and look at the top right corner or read our Q&A? who is the one being rude? but people will just crop what we said to show only the "bad" things without all the context, or even change our words! and then they ask why we get defensive? I know we were right about people since the beginning, but this is just MUCH MORE THAN BEING RIGHT.

We're not coming back anymore... I just accepted it yesterday, even if we get our site back we'll close it, it's not worth doing so much for people that don't even care. I'm not mad for the haters that closed our site, but for the people who we thought they cared but right now are doing nothing to help us... they were really only up for themselves from the beginning... I wanted to know who were these people by posting my questionable poll and revealing how we truly work, but this... this just tell us enough, no one is helping us even when I plead for their help, even when I gave them the link about the hater requesting to delete our site and even when they know that ban is just unfair, they're doing nothing, they're not even trying, they don't even care.

We're not gonna work anymore for anyone again but for ourselves from now on, and I personally will stop caring, stop helping, and stop doing anything for anyone that is not my own family. I had hope on people... not anymore, I should have listened to my brother, but I just wanted so much to make a change... to make it fair for the unnoticed creator... not even for me, but for them.

I hope everyone enjoy their thousands of views when most of them are from bots, the comments saying "I LOVE your art!" when they really don't, the "likes" from people on their updates when they don't even take a look at them, the many people that follows them when just a few or none actually cares... then they say we were chasing numbers... WE'VE ALWAYS KNOWN NUMBERS ARE FAKE! we were looking for more REACH not for numbers, but none of you couldn't understand that. I hope you all enjoy your social media and I hope you all waste all your life on it.

Goodbye~

Oh and get rid of my drawings on your page, no one but my family deserves them, and don't bother reply as I'll close this email."

Since, as "F+F" stated in their first email, they don't care if I reveal these messages or not, I will. I believe everybody reading this should be entitled to the full knowledge of what happened behind the scenes.

As for the links, your Steam page is literally the 5th result on DuckDuckGo, anybody searching up this controversy would've found it out by themselves, along with the other links. I have no idea who they're talking about when they talk about their family, I can only assume they're talking about their brother. And I'm not going to get rid of your drawings on my page.

I wonder if I should keep their site on my Links page...

Screenshots

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