wind of change (Patreon)

I must admit that there appears to have been some form of sabotage...

We intentionally tried to slow the client’s progress—nearly derailing it—in an attempt to please the server into submission and allow it to stabilize itself. However, that approach to fixing our complicated Batman-and-Robin-turned-Joker-and-Joker relationship clearly failed.

We’ll soon change our Patreon from a way to discourage Omegle’s former advanced users from using OmeTV into a way to sustain the real thing at scale. It was being developed for the new Omegle, but that turned out not to be what we’d been hoping for, the client will still work.

Yeah, the browser extension itself is useless since nov 23. Who needs a caged beast anyway?

Ever since the OG site shut down, there had been an open question about whether OmeTV, as its successor on the server side, would ultimately be worth billions or merely millions.

Despite our best efforts to achieve a positive outcome on the client side of this internet machine, the server has run into serious trouble in its partnership with Apple—likely due to mishandled communication. Our project can relate to that, their communication sucks.

Even in such a worst-case scenario our decision not to save omegle.com has already generated millions for our home platform. A large-scale psyop that cost us significant resources but managed to defend the og's niche on yt/tt and relaunch Omegle on shaky foundations has also generated millions for the platform, regardless of the legal outcome of said platform, which I would prefer to survive at this point (xiaomi users 🤮).

Snitching on OmeTV’s apps and rebooting Omegle with 600K advanced users from all of its extensions in November 2023 was the only practical way to build a new chat roulette IP, but we chose loyalty, and well, it didn’t work out quite as expected xD

This is something we, as a third-party schizoproject, can never simply cash out and walk away from — not because of any single disagreement, but because of a complete lack of communication or possibly the server’s apparent unwillingness to show goodwill toward Russians because of wrongdoing in their home country. There are no Russians here, by the way, but I doubt that people existing on the receiving end of that ugly state give a fuck about semantics at this point.

Server drama aside, the client-side conflict is often imagined by people like this as an arms race: one side makes a move, and the other responds, as if they were playing chess. And it is not as though the loyal faction that still somehow controls Omegle’s client will simply stop using it in the best interests of OmeTV and start thinking about whats best for the client.

The reason we did not respond appropriately to provocative actions — including attacks against our users and server infrastructure — is that we had already publicly declared our nuclear capabilities (that we were supposed to use against omegle in the worst case!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), while OmeTV’s position at that particular moment was extremely weak, and we had already bid on that position every bit of our influence in the OG community. Something happened in late 2023, but I can’t remember exactly what. Hmm…

Our policy was straightforward: modding would either operate within the Chrome Web Store’s policies or outside them. In such network, the client has more power by default. However, this was a dick-measuring contest when both sides were underdogs, and it came even before we contributed millions of dollars to that human-interaction machine by sacrificing omegle.com as a server again and again and again. xDDD

We now believe that one niche modding group — possibly Ukrainian — has been harassing one of the oldest Russian voice Omegle clones, which has existed since 2011, for the past several months. Nothing political, just children fucking around, causing significant trouble, and getting ACTUALLY involved in the pointless client/server dispute over who controls the client: the client or the server. That group appears to be very close to discovering a nuclear solution to this arms race (Anthropic is still far from an IPO): technology that we have kept hidden from the public for years, even while under attack, for a reason.

The group’s activities do not currently interfere with ours. However, if this technology is released publicly, it could trigger a race among multiple groups to develop an actually useful commercial client, potentially causing us to lose the niche we have kept on a very long leash.

It will also ultimately lead to OmeTV and others COMPLETELY losing control over the web.

We can no longer continue stalling the client’s progress simply to appease people who are either afraid to communicate with the client or think too highly of themselves to do so.

It makes no logical sense, and it leaves us looking like complete idiots in all of our users’ eyes.

We want to personally apologize to every user for the client’s current state.

I myself became too emotionally attached to the product, as any modder would under such circumstances, and was unwilling to risk harming it while its future remained uncertain.

I am currently going through minor surgery — nothing serious — but I’ll imagine it being removing any last bits of weakness toward something we’ve sacrificed millions of dollars for, and we’ll start developing and promoting a WebRTC client that could generate something, but at least we’ll be going somewhere. We’ve had that thing operational for many months, and prototypes for years. We’ll take back the entire web, and since there are two people in the conversation—including you—replacing your client would be enough. XD

The end of this month will mark FIVE YEARS since the original browser extension was shadowdropped.

It has been a long, fucked-up journey, but this is an important milestone for our project as we transition from being a shadow ally that helped carry OmeTV to where it is today to establishing an identity of our own and building a client that every power user on the web must have.

I won’t say much, but I started building mods for P2P random video chat services because I lost the competition to SponsorBlock by being too little, too late... we still own the glass, btw.

Our intention is to provide the best possible user experience for desktop users and, in the future, perhaps for mobile web users as well. Simplify content creation and give the power of the decentralized network back to the people. I believe Omegle is just another dark corner of the internet, and it deserves a tailored browser that helps people browse safely and securely.

We will be transparent with users — for example, by telling them that they probably shouldn’t pay to get unbanned on OmeTV, as it’s an ua scam op that has gone WAY TOO FAR, that Umingle is a “Russian” psyop gone wrong, and that Monkey is an extension of a Chinese state surveillance apparatus and should probably be avoided entirely. But we won’t go so far as organizing contests to catch predators, especially when the real aim is to damage reputations, etc. We just want to build a good client that will map Omegle’s universe and probably focus on the server that I unironically believe 30-40% of people online are direct consequences of my decisions in critical moments.

I don’t know how long it will take me to recover from my medical procedure, it should be fast enough (maybe a week or two, long coding sessions are really stressful) but I am not alone in this modding degeneracy. I can say with confidence that whatever happens next will make you look at what we do differently, and never think of us as weak or ask, “What the fuck is this?” We will begin rebuilding the trust that you, as users, place in us, and we will deliver things that change how you perceive these dark corners of the internet. I truly believe that what we have done up to this point, from our position as the queen of the OG Omegle hive, has had a positive impact on you that you probably will never realize.

OmeTV, as an organization, is a small group of people who managed to abuse Google and Apple as a front for Omegle unnoticed for a very long time. As a client-side project, we owe a lot to that, but it's essentially a "double your money" scam—like, "If you send me $100, I'll send back $200 in just 30 minutes." xD If we cannot get at least a part of that $3.1 mln we've sent back, we will at least build a cool random video chatting client for all of you to spread on the internet! It’s still better than any job offer I’m currently able to get, praise ai btw.

a gif with a truck on a crash test

-qrlk