While aimed at fans of 4chan, RemiliaChat will have some level of content moderation.
The Milady gang thinks social media is broken, calling the community of fans the “diaspora of chan culture” — such as the notoriously edgy 4chan. To fix that, the NFT project’s creators are launching a social media network to rival X, with the first step coming via official Milady profiles.
RemiliaNET is an in-browser experience that will allow the community to track their Milady achievements and build up a “social credit score,” with a competitive leaderboard to boot. And the upcoming RemiliaChat, with no release date confirmed, looks to be a fully fledged social media platform with an algorithm-driven feed and chat function.
“Remilia’s goal has never been just to dominate crypto and NFTs. We plan to save the entire culture of the internet, and the world through it, in the same way we did for crypto. RemiliaChat is how we achieve this,” Remilia Corporation Chief of Staff Michael Dragovic told Decrypt. “RemiliaNET is the identity service layer of Remilia Chat. We’re launching it now prior to releasing full social features to begin the onboarding process.”
Two weeks ago, a mysterious countdown started on the Milady Cult website, sending its community into a frenzy of theories and self-referential memes — the latest being, “What did CULT mean by this?” As it ticked down to zero, an additional eight days were added to the clock in the wake of last week’s assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
On Friday, the clock finally finished, and it was revealed that what CULT meant was that RemiliaNET is now open for business.
Users of RemiliaNET will have the option of using one of the default Kagami-style profile pictures, or connecting their wallet to use an NFT profile picture from a wide array of Remilia and derivative collections — including Radbro, Aura, and Schizposters.
Most importantly, though, the platform will become the go-to spot for the Milady community to track their achievements, which translates to a “social credit score” used to place everyone upon a global leaderboard.
Achievements can already be unlocked via the Remilia Achievement Score page. Some of these can be collected by minting specific NFTs, playing on the Miladycraft Minecraft server, or participating in one of the project’s many alternate reality games.
The new system, Remilia Corporation says, however, will be much more seamless. Plus, the number of achievements is also set to expand with the launch of the site, with notifications prompting users when a new achievement is available.
In doing this, Dragovic — better known as Scorched Earth Policy — confirmed to Decrypt that RemiliaNET will act as a platform for users to “actively and knowingly” participate in “manipulation rounds.” This refers to periods where Milady’s CULT token is airdropped to users based on their achievements and rankings, although Dragovic added that rewards will not be limited to CULT tokens.
“RemiliaNET assigns a public ‘social credit score’ to every user that serves as multifactor sybil detection as well as cross-platform scoring, which will result in hidden incentive rewards,” Dragovic told Decrypt. “[It] will extend beyond direct token allocation into a general rewards ecosystem. These will be used to encourage user behaviors that maximize quality contribution and community distribution.”
Friday’s launch of RemiliaNET is just the first step towards the creation of RemiliaChat, an ambitious Milady-infused attempt to disrupt the social media status quo. Remilia Corporation leader Charlotte Fang has been preparing the cult for this moment for years, forcing the core team to flicker through different platforms for communication.
“We’ve experimented with dozens of platforms in the past five years alone,” Dragovic said. “We’re definitely veterans of the internet, and we have quite a bit of experience with understanding what makes a platform work and what keeps that fire alive.”
As such, Dragovic said, the team has learned lessons from what they see as the downfall of Reddit, Discord, Twitter, and chan culture, especially 4chan. RemiliaChat will attempt to build on those failings to build a social media platform with a content feed, chat, and profiles. Specifically, RemiliaChat will look to reduce the pertinence of “slop” content via a custom algorithm, and emphasize anonymity and pseudonymity.
It’s not just the team leading the Milady-sphere that is deeply rooted in internet culture; the entire community is a product of obsession with online spaces and disillusionment with the perceived degradation of society.
“Remilia has been very much a product of the diaspora of chan culture,” Dragovic told Decrypt. “People are yearning for a new platform and a new space. RemeliaChat wants to be that. It wants to be the place where people go. It’s going to be one of the first and only platforms that’s designed around really hard online discourse principles.”
With a core community entrenched in online culture and a team dedicated to critiquing it, RemiliaChat hopes to become a new cultural hub for the cultivation of radical thought.
“Society’s most important discourse always occurs in iconic gathering places,” Dragovic said. “These places were our tribal campfires, our Athenian forums, our zones of intellectual exchange. And within them, always a core group of people coming together to develop the ideas of their time.”
“Our pivotal places now happen online,” he added. “Our iconic minds are anonymous posters.”
Milady, Remilia, and its surrounding communities have become a melting pot of ideas branching to the far corners of all wings of the political spectrum. However, many outsiders would likely characterize the group as far-right, with its tendencies to echo racist and other controversial sentiments.
In part, however, the group’s flirtation with fringe theories comes as part of Fang’s concept of “pre-cancelling” yourself. This has led to members leaning into shock humor or intentionally saying slurs under the intention of appearing punk, despite not necessarily agreeing with their own take.
As a result of this ethos, moderation on traditional social media platforms has become a problem for the community. RemiliaChat, to the dismay of its community, cannot be completely unmoderated as the spread of illegal and unethical content, such as child sexual abuse materials, may occur.
Remilia Corporation confirmed to Decrypt that it will have a moderation system in place, and claims to have been learning lessons on how to handle it through its previous projects.
“Our intention is to do as little moderation as possible in terms of content,” Dragovic told Decrypt. “Our belief is that 90% of moderation comes from the way you design the layout of your site. The site should itself steer the user into posting a certain way and creating a certain form of engagement.”
“We’ll intervene on the absolutely necessary parts,” he added, “like bad actors, illegal shit, and things that could get the FBI knocking on our door.”
