I really enjoyed playing an old Flash game known as Gikopoi. However, circa 2021, when Adobe pulled the plug on Flash, Gikopoi's days were numbered. What happened between then and now is a long story, but long story short, I now host the most active Gikopoi international server, and I set up some services to support the community, even writing a few from scratch.

This post will look at the various services that are not the actual game/chat of Gikopoi.

Wiki

https://wiki.gikopoi.com

A lot of people on the "alternet" enjoy reading wikis, and some of them really enjoy writing for wikis. Given that the core audience of Gikopoi really enjoy reading and writing, a wiki felt like a natural fit. However, I felt like all existing wiki softwares were overly complex, so I basically made a clone of the original wiki's software and it runs like an imageboard or gikopoi itself -- no accounts systems to impede editting, write and talk about anything you want.

It took me roughly a week or so to write the software. After the basic features of viewing, editting, linking, and reverse linking pages were implemented, I pretty much haven't touched the code. Nearly a year later and we have over 200 pages.

I'm pretty happy with this!

BBS

https:///bbs.gikopoi.com

The "core group" of gikopoi enjoy anonymous messageboards: the original game takes much inspiration from them, and it was anonymous messageboard users by the way of 4chan who first began heavily frequenting Gikopoi in the West.

It took me several weeks of work to get this off the ground. Instead of just running yet another Kareha instance, I wanted something more unique -- so I looked at modern ayashii's "tree" threads (like USENET and Reddit) and multichan's "tags" as a way to improve on the basic concept of inflated guestbooks.

Roughly 1.5 years since I began writing it, it now sits at >60 threads and >500 comments: a lot slower than other boards, but I consider it reasonably successful!

Booru

https://booru.gikopoi.com

People in text chats will eventually want to share images or other kinds of media. Sometimes they want to look back at the media they wish to share, especially if it's original content. Unlike the other two services, I did not write this software myself, but opted to use Shimmie2.

Boorus let posters quickly and easily to upload media, tagging it as they please, and viewers to quickly consume media and filter the content by tags. I think they outperform "traditional" imageboards at the goal of sharing media such as images or music in a community. People mostly seem to use the booru for sharing photos of their cats and food, but it can be used for anything they want.

Roughly 1 year since the service went live, there are now nearly 300 photos and mp3s uploaded. People don't always use it in lieu of alternative media hosts such as discord, imgur, or catbox, but it does serve as an interesting reference of what gikos consider sharing and archiving. I would consider it to be a success.

Events

https://events.gikopoi.com

The only service I've written outside of the game that matches up with non-game services on the original host. For those who didn't know, the original gikopoi game allowed people to create events from within the game, and had a seperate page to let the world see upcoming events, whether they be live music streams, game nights, or other kinds of scheduling that a community should gather around.

This is the only service I would consider to be a failure. It may be due to the fact that the international audience all lives on different timezones or that atom feeds / ical are relatively obscure formats -- or that giko regulars who are logged in all the time will already be there for scheduled events on their clocks and won't be able to be there for scheduled events off their clocks.

Sitting 4 months into 2025 there are 8 events created. One is a test, one is spam, two were events that never happened, two were regular events that didn't see any gain in users from the event page being created.

If anyone ever wants to share an event with anyone else and use gikopoi as a medium, and they're aware of this service, I think they could benefit a lot. Scheduled events could have a lot of merit. I could see the calendar picking up steam if giko regulars wanted to share events with people who don't regularly use the service or maybe if there were 20 or 30 regulars as opposed to 10, but at this point, it's dead in the water.

In a big picture view: I think one thing that could really benefit people is if they realized that gikopoi is full of empty rooms with stream slots that they can share with anyone to trivially chat with as they enjoy the stream. If use of ical format (built into Android, iPhone, and most mail apps) were more common, I think people would see the virtue in this service. But as of yet, the most "true to form" custom service is the least used. Maybe things will change in the future.

Matrix

The Matrix service is very underutilized but regulars who want a matrix server seem happy with having the one provided. I don't have a lot of confidence in Matrix as Discord/IRC/XMPP replacement but there is a Matrix server that exists and is available.

XMPP

Unfortunately I could not find a reasonable way to host XMPP without requiring manual account creation, which is at odds with a public chat service such as Gikopoi. However there are a small number of Gikos who wanted XMPP accounts who I could coordinate with off-site who could receive them, and they all seem to appreciate this service. I frequently talk with my @gikopoi.com XMPP friends, especially with E2EE encryption via the OMEMO standard, and I hope they can talk with each other as well, and know they can do so with strong client-side encryption.

I don't know who the intended audience for this post is. Future Gikopoi admins? Bored linux geeks? But here's some reflections and observations that have come to me from my time investments, and if any of it is helpful, I'm appreciative.