The Rot That’s Killing FetLife
Why FetLife’s Leadership is Bad for BDSM
The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.
— Ray Kroc.
On January 3, 2008, software engineer John Kopanas — also known as JohnBaku — officially launched FetLife.com. Originally known as Friends with Fetishes, the site was originally intended to help him find partners interested in kink. At the time, Baku probably didn't realize how popular the social network would become.
Or how controversial. Throughout its history, FetLife has lost access to its merchant accounts and payment processors multiple times due to its content. It's also been tangentially involved in several lawsuits and criminal cases.
Some of these struggles can admittedly be attributed to social pressure. There are still many who see even vanilla extramarital sex as deviant and anything kinkier as abhorrent. Unfortunately, plenty of these people hold positions of power that they gleefully use to impose their draconian morality.
Just ask anyone who's done online sex work about their efforts to find a payment processor.
Unfortunately, there’s more to this story than frothing moralism. FetLife’s issues go well beyond the fact that puritans regard it as a den of deviancy. The rot runs far deeper — the real problem with FetLife is its leadership.
FetLife's terms of service have been criticized as vague and appear to be inconsistently enforced. The social network's moderators, themselves community members, frequently seem to either mishandle or outright ignore issues that directly affect people's safety and security. Community members have no clear mechanisms to ensure transparency or accountability, while top-down communication is insufficient.
Some might argue that these issues can be traced to FetLife's rapid growth. How could anyone prepare for that kind of popularity? To them, we'd pose a simple question:
At what point do growing pains become a pattern of behavior?
A Garden Choked by Weeds
Almost from the start, FetLife was criticized for not doing enough to protect its users. Over time, it has arguably gotten worse. Today, the social network that bills itself as a thriving community and safe space for kink feels, to many, more like a toxic cesspool of hateful conduct, predatory behavior, and abuse.
What’s more, certain users appear to receive special treatment, allowing them to freely:
Encourage self-harm.
Make violent threats.
Engage in targeted, organized harassment.
Perpetuate transphobia and homophobia.
Spread racist rhetoric.
Promote misogyny.
One individual has even publicly boasted about being temporarily banned hundreds of times for engaging in the above behavior. On any other social network, his account would have been deleted. On FetLife, he receives an occasional, inconsistent slap on the wrist.
Unless the social network’s leadership does something about these bad actors — until they excise the weeds choking the life from their walled garden of kink — they cannot claim to be safe.
Quiet on the Scene: How FetLife Silences Community Members
From the perspective of its community, FetLife’s leadership doesn’t just overlook abusive behavior. They also punish those who call for change. This punishment can take many forms.
Some users report being de-trended, their content hidden from the activity feeds of friends and followers. Others have been banned without justification. Sometimes, FetLife will go so far as to delete a user’s account entirely, seemingly disregarding its own policies in the process.
In just the last quarter of 2024, for example, Baku and his team:
Banned four well-known community members who exposed the actions of a predatory plagiarist through collaboration with his victims. This was only reversed after community backlash.
Punished marginalized people for pointing out issues with the raceplay kink, which Baku identified as hateful/obscene in 2017.
Banned over eighty users for discussing — and in some cases, merely sharing — a writing that suggested contacting FetLife's business partners about the community’s lack of consistent enforcement.
Deleted a user's account after she attempted to bring attention to obscene and violent content in a group called Revoke Women's Rights.
Deleted several other accounts that called attention to this action.
Baku often speaks about how much he loves listening to the community. His actions speak much louder. He and the rest of his leadership team seem content to lounge in their ivory tower, surrounded by sycophants who help them everything’s just fine.
FetLife isn't a sinking ship that's alienating its most active users. They’re all doing a wonderful job. Anyone who says otherwise is just overly sensitive.
Inside FetLife’s History of Misconduct
For an idea of just how bad things are, we'd recommend reading Avoid FetLife. Written by former FetLife user paddlepriest — who at one point was part of Baku's inner circle — it paints a damning picture of the kinky social network. The series begins by outlining FetLife's severe moderation problem, which has allowed (and in some cases, appears to have enabled):
The presence of pedophilic and zoophilic content and users.
Sex trafficking and sexual predation.
Allowing felons and registered sex offenders to create accounts.
Non-consensual threats of rape and violence.
Groups linked to real-world extremism.
Incest.
Hate speech.
Hiding obscene and dangerous content and users in lieu of removal.
Throughout the series, paddlepriest details how FetLife penalizes content critical of Baku or its business practices. Users who share or interact with said content are, more often than not, unilaterally and severely punished. The most troubling — and, perhaps, telling — detail about Avoid FetLife, however, is the picture it paints of Baku himself.
A thin-skinned, manipulative predator with a documented history of abusive behavior that includes stalking, bullying, harassment, and sexual assault. A spiteful, two-faced egotist who gives people in his good graces special treatment such as information on who's reporting their content. A vengeful, impulsive man who makes poor decisions such as hiring the director of a pro-pedophilia organization as the head of his Trust and Safety team.
While these are largely unproven allegations, it bears mentioning that Baku is supposedly persona non grata in his home city's kink community.
Leading to Ruin
You can tell a lot about a leader by how they run their organization.
A good leader is humble and transparent. They're dedicated to self-improvement and positive growth, and willing to listen to both their team and community. They act with honesty and integrity, holding themselves accountable for their mistakes.
John Baku is not a good leader. In a different world, FetLife could have been exactly what it claims to be: A place where everyone can explore BDSM free of judgment or abuse. With Baku at the helm, however, the social network has been in a perpetual downward spiral since its very first day.
Baku, for his part, is either too ignorant or too egotistical to see that his current course only ends one way: With his social network insolvent as it hemorrhages users to competitors. He'd rather stick his head in the sand than course correct. He'd rather silence detractors than listen to their grievances.
People have been trying to fix FetLife for well over a decade. Maybe it’s finally time to admit that it’s beyond repair. Time to give people a platform on which they can share their experiences.
