FOSTA screwed things up for a lot of people. No one can argue that is not true. It left many of us “homeless” when it came to the websites that used to be our main sources of communication and connection within the world of Consensual Transactional Sex. The widespread closure of many sites by their operators out of fear of FOSTA, coupled with the Federal seizure of Backpage, created a huge hole in the means for sex workers and clients to connect.

And thus began our search. Our quest to find new homes. Some old places remained. Small, local sites. Disused sites that had never really met our needs. Unreliable and disreputable venues for online communication. But few quality spaces remained. So we worked to stay connected. We turned to mainstream Social Media, creating our own little corners of places like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook where we could talk, and yet try to remain unseen by those who might suspend us.

And then new places started popping up. And some old places started changing. For a couple of weeks I received a fairly constant stream of messages asking if I knew anything about one new website after another. I did not keep a count of how many sites I looked at and signed up with. At least a dozen or more. Most have not been worth my time. Others haven’t been too bad. Some are even good. I won’t talk about all of them, but here are four sites that I have used and some thoughts on them. They range from a regional site to an international one.

YesBackPage

After (and even before) the fall of Backpage there appeared a number of “BP clones”—sites that looked like BP, but were not. Mostly they had just copied adds off of BP and posted them without permission. These sites are practically useless, and likely quite dangerous. But then cam a new one, a site that has raised a lot of questions: YesBackPage.

There is a lot of suspicion within the CTS community about the validity of YBP. Is it legit? Is it just another BP clone? Can it be trusted?

Not everyone agrees on the answers to these questions. So far, there have been almost no listings on the site that have been of any value to me where I live, but others are reporting quite different things in their areas. And I have been sent a copy of an email that YBP sent to a provider I know. In this email YBP is offering to give financial credit to any providers who lost money when BP was taken down. Many ladies had prepaid for ads for months in advance and lost all that money. YBP is offering to help them out. To me, this is fairly promising information about the validity of YBP. It is definitely a site to keep an eye on.

[Click here to the YesBackPage Email]

PrivateDelights

Ah, PD. The “replacement” for NightShift. Or at least that is what people are claiming. When this first appeared I was skeptical. But I checked it out. Ended up spending a while chatting online with one of the creators of the site. It really made me feel good about joining. PD has been a bit slow when it comes to getting up to speed. But maybe that is a good thing. Some areas have experienced much faster growth than mine, but the tide is shifting. And it is nice to see resources again that ca be potentially valuable for screening purposes for BOTH sex workers and clients.

As far as replacing NS, it might do much more than that. PD already has a much broader reach. NS was very regional, mostly for Northern California. PD is nation-wide.

Party2Please

P2P is a regional site, mostly for central and Northern California. Supposedly it’s primary goal was to allow people from NS to reconnect and for people to get connected to social events. It started up fairly quickly after the fall of NS, and it did allow for NS users to connect with one another.

But it is a highly restrictive site. The owners have taken to calling it a “dating” site, and are quite insistent on users of the site sticking with such euphemisms.

Switter

Switter is a Mastadon-based social media platform for the CTS community. It is world-wide and highly active. It started up fairly quickly after the passage of FOSTA, but is outside of FOSTA’s jurisdiction. It has tens of thousands of users. It has become a great site for connecting with people.

Frankly, it has become the beating heart for a large part of the CTS community. It is a very community centered site. People feel very free to post almost anything they want. There is a pretty good chance that YOU found out about my blog through Switter.

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None of these sites is perfect. The sites they replaced were not perfect. But they have each offered some value. More value for some people than others. It remains to be seen what else might be on the horizon. More new and better sites could be around the corner. Existing sites might become so much more than they are. Only the future know for sure.

Until then, thank you for tuning into my website. I hope this post helps. Each of these sites has had some benefit, some more than others.

 

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