A public vote, not a handpicked successor: how Anthony Smith stepped back.

Second of two parts on the real split between LowEndTalk (LET) and LowEndSpirit (LES). Part 1 covered why Anthony Smith left LET's admin team and the deliberate founding principles behind LES, privacy, accountability, and no pay-to-post. This part picks up with the 2021 leadership handoff and follows the story through to today: what happened to the community once its founder actually stepped back, twice.

In this part
1. A democratic handoff
2. This won't be my show, it'll be our show
3. Ghost town mode
4. Other forums that tried
5. What any community manager can take from this
6. Appendix, quick reference

A democratic handoff

By late 2020, Anthony Smith was already signaling a plan to step back from LES's admin role, not suddenly, but incrementally, with what he described as "a reset switch should the excrement hit the fan." When Inception Hosting, his hosting business, was sold, that timeline accelerated. His own words on the decision were direct: "Given recent events it is clear to me that I am even less in a position to take this place forward than I was before." He wanted, in his own phrase, to "become as regular a member as possible", a striking goal for a forum's own founder, and a direct rejection of the ownership-as-permanent-control model that had driven the fork from LowEndTalk in the first place.

What happened next is unusually well documented for a community leadership transition: a public nomination and vote thread, open to the whole membership, rather than Anthony Smith simply picking his own successor. He retained only domain-level control as an emergency safeguard, a technical failsafe, not ongoing authority over decisions.

Mason emerged quickly as the clear community favorite. Other members' own words from the thread capture why: one described him as "level-headed and trustworthy," another as a "seasoned campaigner" with real VPS experience who wasn't himself a provider, a detail members explicitly valued, since a provider-admin would reintroduce exactly the conflict-of-interest problem LES had been founded to avoid. Ympker, who received his own nominations, declined and threw his support behind Mason instead, preferring to stay active as a regular member rather than take on an admin role himself, a small, telling echo of Anthony Smith's own stated preference to step back into ordinary membership.

The vote wasn't purely solemn. The thread includes a handful of joking, sarcastic nominations alongside the serious ones, a sign, if anything, of a community comfortable enough with the process to have some fun with it, rather than treating a leadership transition as too fraught for humor. That's its own small data point about the kind of culture the fork had actually produced by 2021: serious about governance, without being humorless about it.

The result was a genuine, community-selected transition, not a founder anointing an heir, and not a hostile takeover, but the specific alternative to both that LES had been built to make possible in the first place.

This won't be my show, it'll be our show

Mason's first act as admin: sharing power with a co-admin.

Mason's introduction thread as LES's new admin, posted in February 2021, is a useful document for anyone thinking about how to actually take over leadership of a community rather than just winning the vote to do it. A five-year member of the LowEnd community, a data analyst and software developer by trade, and the creator of a well-known benchmarking tool in the space, Mason had real standing before the transition, but standing alone doesn't answer the harder question of what kind of leader someone will actually be once they have the role.

His own framing answered it directly:

"This won't be my show, it'll be our show."

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Mason, on becoming LES's new admin

That's not just a nice line for an introduction post, it committed him, publicly, to a specific governance style before he'd made a single decision as admin: a governance staff body to vote on major calls, rather than one person's unilateral authority. He also committed to an open-door policy, with an explicit line against tolerating personal attacks or racism, while remaining open to constructive criticism, drawing the same kind of clear, principled line LES's concrete, day-to-day moderation always has, now stated in his own voice as the incoming admin.

One decision in that same introduction thread matters more than any other for the specific post you're reading: Mason immediately elevated mikho to equal co-admin status, rather than keeping sole control for himself. His stated reason was direct, mikho "has proven himself to be a valued and knowledgeable member" who brought a hosting-industry perspective Mason himself lacked. That's a leader recognizing a specific gap in his own expertise and choosing to close it by sharing power, rather than trying to fill the gap alone or ignoring it.

Mason also flagged, from the very start, a possible third admin down the line for better timezone coverage, planning for the practical reality of running a global community with a small, volunteer leadership team, rather than assuming two people spread across limited timezones would always be enough. And he explicitly framed the whole effort as continuing Anthony Smith's vision, not replacing it: community-driven development, and the low-end principle of "doing more with less," carried forward rather than reinvented.

Taken together, the introduction thread reads less like a victory lap and more like a job description Mason was writing for himself in public, with the community watching. The next section covers what actually happened once that description met the reality of running a forum over the years that followed.

Ghost town mode

Five quiet years, and an honest admission when the energy ran out.

According to mikho, the co-admin who lived through it directly, the years immediately following the 2021 transition were, in his own words, largely "the same, with little change", a genuine continuity success, exactly what a well-run democratic handoff is supposed to produce. The forum kept functioning, LES's moderation principles kept getting applied the way they'd been designed to, and the community didn't fracture or drift the way a poorly managed leadership change so often causes.

What changed happened later, gradually, and for reasons that had nothing to do with a crisis. Anthony Smith quietly rejoined the LES staff team in February 2026, not as admin, just as staff, his username reverting from a placeholder back to his own name. His own explanation, posted to the forum: he'd stepped away originally over a conflict of interest, which had since ended, and then stayed away longer than planned "due to ongoing health issues." In the years between, he'd been employed rather than running his own company, and by his own account visited LES only infrequently during that stretch, a founder who was, for a while, simply somewhere else, doing something else, on someone else's schedule.

Three months later, on May 2, 2026, Mason and mikho posted together: full admin duties and ownership, handed back to Anthony. Their own words, not softened for this post:

"We simply haven't had the time or energy required to give LES the active management and attention it truly deserves."

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Mason and mikho, "Returning the Torch"

Five years of keeping the lights on, ad-free and stable, without much active growth, and an open admission of that, in public, by the people who'd done it.

The handback itself started smaller than it sounds. Mason raised it first in a Discord conversation, off the forum entirely. mikho's own account of that moment:

"I had no problems with a hand-over, especially as I had less time to enjoy LES due to my own ventures as owning my own company. It was just a surprise, as I must have misunderstood what he wrote."

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mikho, on the Discord message that started the handback

He'd read Mason's message as being about bringing Anthony back on for extra help, more hands on deck, not a change of ownership, and only realized later what Mason actually meant. By the time he understood it, he was fine with it: he was running his own company by then too, and had less of his own bandwidth for LES than he'd had in 2021.

It's worth being honest about what can and can't be concluded from this. mikho's account is a firsthand description of a pattern he lived, not a fully diagnosed cause. Communities go quiet for reasons that have nothing to do with leadership, and a founder's return isn't automatically why energy picks back up either. What can be said with more confidence is the shape of the whole arc: five years of stable, careful stewardship, followed by the people doing that stewardship naming their own limits out loud and handing the thing back to the person who built it, not because he took it back, but because they offered.

That's a different kind of ending than the tidy version of this story usually gets told. A "successful" handoff, by the standard metric of "did the new admins keep things running," produced exactly that, and still ended, five years later, with an honest admission that keeping something running and actively growing it aren't the same job, and that recognizing which one you're doing is itself a form of good stewardship.

Other forums that tried

vpsBoard and HostBalls: two other forks, two very different endings.

LowEndSpirit isn't the only attempt to build an alternative home for the budget-hosting community, and two other real cases, researched in enough depth to actually compare, not just name-check, show how differently a fork can end.

vpsBoard launched in October 2013, close to the same year Anthony Smith's original, ultra-budget version of LES got started. Its founder, who went by MannDude, wasn't reacting to a specific governance dispute the way Anthony Smith was. His stated founding motive was almost off-hand, "fueled by tea and general boredom", but the actual design was pointed: explicit provider neutrality, self-hosted infrastructure to avoid third-party tracking, and a strong anti-censorship stance, stated plainly in the forum's own founding post: "we do not resort to the removal, modification or altering of any legitimately posted content." mikho, who was a LowEndTalk member and semi-active on vpsBoard at the time, though his own focus was really the original lowendspirit.com and its $3-or-less VPS niche, where he ran his own budget VPS business, mrvm.net, from 2018 to December 2024, remembers vpsBoard having noticeably less spam and fewer ad-hominem attacks than LET during that period.

It grew fast, by MannDude's own account hitting hundreds of new posts a day at its peak. It shut down in February 2017, and MannDude's stated reasons were mundane rather than dramatic: a software upgrade he found miserable to work with, licensing costs no longer worth renewing, infrastructure spread across more servers than the forum's actual size justified. What wasn't mundane was his stated position on what would happen to the site itself: he refused to sell it or hand it to anyone, citing the privacy risk in trusting someone else with years of user logs.

That stance didn't hold. vpsBoard came back later under KnownHost, a real, established commercial hosting company, the exact kind of outcome MannDude's original refusal was built to prevent. It's technically still online today. Per mikho, it's effectively dead, no real activity, just occasional spam.

HostBalls tells a closer-to-home version of the same underlying story. Its founder, Jarland, had been a LowEndTalk admin himself before leaving, not over a governance dispute, but because a new job came with a non-compete clause. He built HostBalls explicitly as what he called a non-toxic escape from LET, deliberately playing down the commercial deal-posting that dominates both LET and LES. He ran it from 2018 until 2023, when he handed it, voluntarily, not through any acquisition, to a staff member named Wolveix, who still owns and runs it today under an explicit rule: no company or third party has any part in how the forum operates.

One more name on that staff list is worth sitting with: HostBalls had its own admin named Mason from 2018 to 2021, who left after disagreements with Jarland, the same year LowEndSpirit's Mason took the helm there. They're the same person. It's a genuine through-line between these two comparison cases, not a coincidence of a common username: someone who left one fork's leadership after a falling-out went on to run a different, comparable fork carefully and well for the next five years. Line them up and the actual lesson isn't "forking works" or "forking doesn't." It's that a fork's staying power seems to depend less on how justified the original grievance was, and more on what happens to ownership after the founder eventually steps back, a question LES, HostBalls, and vpsBoard each answered differently, with three genuinely different results.

What any community manager can take from this

What any community manager can take from LES's story.

Strip away the specific hosting-industry details, and the LET-to-LES story is a template that recurs across online communities of every kind: a platform's commercial incentives drift away from its members' interests, moderation starts bending around who's paying rather than who's right, a critical mass of trust erodes, and eventually someone with enough credibility and enough of a concrete plan builds an alternative. The specifics of exactly who ran ColoCrossing or what its business relationships looked like matter less to a reader running their own Discord server or subreddit than the underlying pattern does.

The first lesson is structural: examine whose interests your moderation actually protects when they conflict, not just what your rules say on paper. LET's stated rules likely looked reasonable throughout this entire story. What mattered was the pattern of enforcement, whose bans got reversed, and why, which is exactly the kind of thing that's invisible from a rulebook and only visible from the inside, the way it was to Anthony Smith as a volunteer admin watching his own decisions get quietly undone.

The second lesson is about transitions: Anthony Smith's decision to hand LES to a community vote rather than picking his own successor, and his explicit goal of becoming "as regular a member as possible," is a genuinely rare and replicable model. Most founder-led communities either never transition leadership at all, or transition it through private arrangement rather than open process. A public nomination and vote, with the founder retaining only an emergency technical safeguard rather than ongoing authority, is a concrete structure other community builders can copy directly.

The third lesson is the least comfortable: even a well-executed transition doesn't fully dissolve a founder's gravitational pull, as the "ghost town mode" pattern from earlier in this part shows. Planning for that, actively building other sources of community energy and leadership visibility that don't depend on the founder's continued presence, is worth doing deliberately, rather than assuming a formal handoff has fully solved the dependency on its own.

None of this guarantees a fork will succeed, or that forking is even the right response to a given community's problems. Sometimes the better answer really is reform from within. But when reform genuinely isn't available, as it wasn't for Anthony Smith, this post's case shows what a fork built on more than just frustration can actually look like: a specific grievance, a credible founder, a deliberate governance philosophy, and, years later, a real community still standing on the other side of it.

Appendix, quick referencer

Timeline
- ~2010-2011, Anthony Smith becomes active in the LowEndBox/LowEndTalk community
- ~2013-2014, Original LowEndSpirit NAT-container hosting brand launches
- Volunteer LET admin period, enforcement decisions repeatedly reversed by ColoCrossing leadership
- 2018, ColoCrossing (LET/LEB's owner) quietly acquired by Deluxe Corporation, discovered via an SEC filing
- December 2019, Mass coordinated shutdown of 20 VPS brands, seventeen of eighteen recently featured on the community's own deal-listing site
- 2019, LowEndSpirit repositioned from a niche hosting brand into a general-purpose forum
- Late 2020, Anthony Smith signals intent to step back as admin
- Feb 2021, Public nomination/vote transitions admin control to Mason, who brings on mikho as equal co-admin
- Feb 2026, Anthony Smith quietly rejoins the LES staff team
- May 2, 2026, Mason and mikho hand full admin duties and ownership back to Anthony ("Returning the Torch")

Other forks, for comparison
- Oct 2013, vpsBoard launches (MannDude), on explicit provider-neutral, privacy-first, anti-censorship principles
- Feb 2017, vpsBoard shuts down; founder refuses to sell it or hand it off, citing user-privacy concerns
- 2018, HostBalls launches (Jarland, an ex-LET admin), built as a "non-toxic escape" from LET; Mason is HostBalls admin, 2018-2021
- 2021, Mason leaves HostBalls after disagreements with founder Jarland; becomes LES's admin the same year
- 2023, Jarland voluntarily hands HostBalls to staff member Wolveix, who still solely owns and runs it today
- Later, vpsBoard is relaunched under KnownHost, a commercial hosting company; today it's technically online but effectively inactive

Glossary
- Fork, a community split where a meaningful group leaves to rebuild elsewhere under different governance
- OG tag, status marker for early LET members who migrated to LES
- Provider tag, required disclosure marking an account as a hosting provider before posting offers
- Pay-to-post, LowEndTalk's practice of charging providers to post offers, which LES deliberately does not do
- Deadpool, community slang for a provider vanishing or shutting down, often abruptly (see this series' companion piece, The Deadpool Files)

Comparison: LES vs. LET moderation (as described by LES's own admin and FAQ)
- Ad hominem attacks: actively cleaned up on LES; more tolerated on LET
- Undisclosed provider offers: actively removed on LES via mandatory tagging
- Charging providers to post: practiced on LET; not practiced on LES
- ColoCrossing-affiliated providers: particular ongoing scrutiny on LES

Three forks, three endings
- LowEndSpirit, founder steps back for a community vote, admins later hand it back to the founder by invitation. Continuity preserved throughout.
- HostBalls, founder hands off voluntarily to a trusted staff member after five years; still privately, solely owned, with an explicit no-company-or-third-party rule.
- vpsBoard, founder shuts it down rather than hand it to anyone, citing privacy; it's acquired by a commercial host anyway, years later, and now sits mostly dormant.

Primary sources for readers who want to go deeper
- Anthony Smith's "A year in LES" retrospective
- The 2021 admin nomination/vote thread
- Mason's admin-introduction thread
- The LES "What the FAQ" thread
- Anthony Smith's founding-intent comment on LES's Rules thread
- "A Familiar Face Returns to the LES Staff Team…" (Feb 2026)
- "Returning the Torch, Future of LowEndSpirit" (May 2026)
- "This is vpsBoard", vpsBoard's founding post (2013)
- "vpsBoard's Future", the KnownHost relaunch announcement
- HostBalls' "Welcome to HostBalls" post, including its staff history

Missed part 1? It is available here.

In this part
1. What a fork actually is
2. LowEndTalk before the split
3. A governance dispute, not just a personality clash
4. The December 2019 mass deadpool as a breaking point
5. The reason we don't have a separate community
6. Building a forum on purpose
7. What LES does differently, concretely

What a fork actually is

A single community, about to become two.

Every online community eventually faces the same quiet threat: not a dramatic collapse, but a slow divergence between what the people running it want and what the people using it need. Most of the time that tension gets absorbed, a policy changes, a moderator resigns, people grumble and stay. Occasionally, it doesn't get absorbed. A meaningful chunk of the community leaves together, rebuilds somewhere else, and the original community keeps existing alongside a new one built from its own departed members. That's a fork, and it's one of the most information-dense events that can happen to a community, because it forces everyone involved to say out loud what they actually valued about the place they're leaving.

This post tells one real fork in detail: the split between LowEndTalk (LET), a budget-hosting forum with roots going back to the early 2010s, and LowEndSpirit (LES), the alternative community founded by a departing LET admin in 2013 that grew, by 2019, into the general-purpose forum it is today. It's a small, specific case, a niche hosting community, not a household name, and that's exactly why it's useful. The dynamics that drove this fork aren't unique to hosting forums. They show up in Discord servers, subreddits, open-source projects, any online space with more than a handful of active members and disagreement about how it should be run.

What makes this particular case unusually well-documented is that the people who lived through it wrote about it, in public, at length, while it was happening and afterward. Anthony Smith, LES's founder, published a lengthy retrospective on his own history in the community and his reasons for building an alternative. The 2021 leadership transition that handed LES to new admins happened through a public nomination and vote thread, not a private handoff. This post draws directly on those primary sources, plus a firsthand account from one of LES's current co-admins, rather than reconstructing the story secondhand.

A fork is, at its core, a moderation philosophy made visible. Every community has one, whether or not it's ever been written down, a working answer to questions like who gets banned, how much abuse a member has to tolerate before something's done about it, whose interests the moderation actually protects when a provider's complaint conflicts with a customer's. Most of the time that philosophy stays implicit, expressed only through individual decisions. A fork happens when enough people decide the implicit answer is wrong, and building a new space with an explicit, different answer is worth the cost of starting over.

That cost is real, and this post doesn't skip it. Forking means losing years of accumulated history, breaking continuity for members who don't follow the split, and betting that a smaller, newer community can eventually replace what the larger, older one provided. Understanding why that bet is sometimes worth making, and what it actually costs when it is, is what the rest of this post is about.

LowEndTalk before the split

LowEndTalk's early years: a small, useful market nobody else took seriously.*

Anthony Smith arrived in the budget-hosting community around 2010 or 2011, active on LowEndBox, the deal-listing site that shares roots with LowEndTalk, while running his own hosting business, Inception Hosting, on the side of a career in IT project management. His retrospective on the community, published years later on LowEndSpirit, describes those early years with real affection: a genuinely useful place where people running $2-a-month VPS businesses could trade advice, catch scams, and build something resembling a professional community around a market nobody else took seriously.

That community had an obvious problem to solve: budget hosting attracts fly-by-night operators at a rate serious industries don't, precisely because the barrier to entry is so low. A forum serving that market needs active, engaged moderation just to stay usable, and for years, LowEndTalk had it, informal, often unpaid, but present. Anthony Smith eventually took on a volunteer admin role there himself, specifically to push back against what he describes as a decline in quality: rising toxicity, meme-driven discourse crowding out substance, and rule violations that needed active enforcement to keep the forum worth using.

That volunteer role is where the story that eventually produced LowEndSpirit actually begins, not with a decision to build something new, but with an attempt to fix something old from the inside. Anthony Smith's account describes actively banning hosts for rule violations and suspected scams during this period, doing the unglamorous, thankless work every functioning community forum depends on and rarely rewards.

It's worth pausing on what made LowEndTalk worth trying to fix in the first place, before the next section covers why that effort broke down. This wasn't a community anyone particularly wanted to abandon. It had real history, a real user base, and, by Anthony Smith's own account, enough value that walking away from it wasn't an easy call, even once the reasons to do so had become clear to him. That reluctance matters for understanding what a fork actually costs the people who choose it: nobody in this story left because LowEndTalk had never been worth anything. They left because something changed, and the next section is about exactly what.

A governance dispute, not just a personality clash

Reversed bans and quiet favoritism turned a personality clash into a governance dispute.*

The break, as Anthony Smith describes it in his own retrospective, wasn't a single dramatic incident. It was a repeated, specific pattern: hosts he'd banned for rule violations and suspected scams getting quietly unbanned by ColoCrossing leadership, the company that owned LowEndTalk and LowEndBox. Enforcement decisions he'd made as a volunteer admin were being reversed above his head, without explanation that satisfied him, in a direction that consistently favored certain providers over the community members those hosts had allegedly harmed.

That pattern is a governance problem, not a personality conflict, and the distinction matters for understanding why it eventually produced a fork instead of just a disagreement. A personality clash gets resolved or endured. A structural conflict of interest, a platform owner with financial relationships to some of the same providers its volunteer moderators are supposed to police, doesn't resolve itself, because the incentive that caused it doesn't go away just because a volunteer objects to it. Anthony Smith's account frames this plainly: he came to believe ColoCrossing was protecting affiliated providers rather than the community the forum nominally served.

The December 2019 mass shutdown of twenty coordinated VPS brands, documented in detail in a companion piece, The Deadpool Files, is the event Anthony Smith's retrospective ties most directly to this dispute, tracing the failure back to operators connected to ColoCrossing's own orbit. Whether or not every specific connection he draws is independently verifiable years later, the broader pattern he describes, a platform where enforcement decisions seemed to bend around commercial relationships, is the concrete, structural grievance underneath everything that followed, not vague dissatisfaction with "the culture."

It's worth being careful here about what this post is and isn't claiming. Anthony Smith's account is one person's record of his own experience as a volunteer admin, published years after the fact, and this post treats it as exactly that: a firsthand, first-person source, not an independently adjudicated finding. What can be said with more confidence is the outcome: Anthony Smith stepped down from LET's admin role, and the community he later built explicitly positioned itself, from its founding philosophy through its FAQ, as a direct response to exactly this pattern: platform-level incentives shaping who moderation actually protects.

That's the governance question this whole post is built around, and it doesn't stay confined to LowEndTalk's specific history. Any community with a commercial owner faces some version of it: whose interests does moderation actually serve when a platform's revenue and its members' wellbeing point in different directions. The rest of this post follows one specific answer to that question, built by people who'd just lived through watching a different answer fail.

The December 2019 mass deadpool as a breaking point

The December 2019 shutdown made the governance problem impossible to ignore.

On a Saturday in December 2019, twenty different "budget VPS" brands, separately branded, separately advertised, all sharing identical page structure, copied marketing text, and the same CAPTCHA implementation underneath, sent customers an identical shutdown notice within hours of each other, then went dark. It's the single best-documented coordinated scam in the budget hosting community's history, covered at length in this series' companion piece, The Deadpool Files, and picked up at the time by outside tech press.

For LowEndTalk specifically, the event landed as more than just another failure to catalogue. Seventeen of the eighteen hosts that had been advertised on the community's own deal-listing site in the two months before the shutdown were among the twenty that vanished, meaning the very platform meant to surface trustworthy budget hosts had, in the run-up to the collapse, been actively promoting most of the brands that turned out to be running the scam. Anthony Smith's retrospective ties this event directly to the governance dispute covered in the previous section, describing it as the kind of outcome that pattern of provider favoritism was always going to eventually produce.

Whether every specific operator behind those twenty brands can be tied definitively to the broader disputes Anthony Smith describes is not something this post can independently verify years later. What's not in dispute is the timing and the optics: a platform-level failure of exactly the kind a healthier, more independent moderation structure exists to prevent, arriving at more or less the same moment the community's most vocal critic of that structure had already stepped away from trying to fix it from the inside.

For a reader trying to understand why a fork happened rather than a slower, quieter reform, this is the event worth sitting with. Structural problems are easy to argue about in the abstract and easy to dismiss as one disgruntled admin's grievance. A coordinated scam ring that fooled the platform's own deal-listing process, in public, with press coverage, is much harder to wave away, and it's the kind of concrete, undeniable failure that turns "I have concerns about how this place is run" into "I'm not staying to find out what happens next."

The next section picks up where Anthony Smith's account of LowEndTalk ends: not with a plan to reform the platform he'd tried and failed to fix, but with a much older project of his own, quietly repositioned into something new.

The reason we don't have a separate community

LowEndSpirit's founding needed no new infrastructure, just a decision to use what already existed.

The LowEndSpirit name predates the fork by years. Anthony Smith launched it originally around 2013-2014 as a niche brand: ultra-budget NAT-based VPS containers, priced as low as a few euros a year, offering barely enough resources to run anything beyond the smallest hobby project. It generated real buzz in the community at the time and inspired other hosts to build similar offerings, but it was never meant as a rival community to LowEndTalk. It was a product, not a platform.

What changed it into a platform was a line from Anthony Smith's own retrospective, written after everything covered in the previous two sections:

"The reason we don't have a separate community is not due to a technical limitation."

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Anthony Smith

Nothing about building an alternative forum required new infrastructure or new expertise, the tools already existed, the community already knew how to use them, and the only thing actually missing was someone deciding it was worth doing. Once the governance dispute with LowEndTalk's ownership had become, in his view, unfixable from the inside, that observation stopped being a passing thought and became a plan.

By 2019, the original niche NAT-hosting brand had been repositioned into LowEndSpirit as a general-purpose forum, the community that exists today. Early members who migrated over from LowEndTalk received "OG" tags, a small, visible marker of tenure and contribution that the forum still uses. It's a detail worth noting for what it signals about the culture being built: status conferred by history and participation, not by who owned what or who was paying for advertising space.

This is the part of the story most fork narratives skip past too quickly: the actual founding moment is rarely as dramatic as the dispute that precedes it. There was no launch event, no marketing campaign, no announcement designed to pull LowEndTalk's user base away in one motion. There was an existing, smaller project, a founder who'd already built the infrastructure and earned the community's trust through years of unrelated participation, and a decision, made explicitly, and said out loud in public, that the only thing standing between "a dispute I can't fix" and "a community I can build instead" was the will to actually do it.

That's worth remembering for anyone reading this post as a guide for their own community, not just a history of this one. The barrier to building an alternative is almost never technical. It's almost always the much harder, much slower work covered in the next section: deciding, on purpose, what the new place should actually be.

Building a forum on purpose

Privacy, accountability, and sustainable funding: LowEndSpirit's founding principles, on purpose.

Most forums accumulate their culture rather than design it: rules get added reactively, one incident at a time, until a patchwork of ad hoc decisions eventually gets called "the community's values." LowEndSpirit's founding is unusual for having done more of that work deliberately, up front, as a direct response to specific failures its founder had just spent years watching up close on LowEndTalk.

Privacy was the first explicit principle. Anthony Smith's retrospective states his approach plainly:

"I don't believe in simply handing access to people's data to others without any pre-qualification or built-in accountability."

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Anthony Smith, on LowEndSpirit's founding privacy principle

That's a direct answer to a specific failure mode, casual admin access to private messages and emails, the kind of unaccountable power that's easy to abuse quietly and hard for ordinary members to even detect, let alone challenge.

Moderation accountability was the second. Rather than relying purely on unpaid volunteer admins exposed to the kind of pressure and abuse that had worn down his own time as a LET moderator, the plan was to build toward paid, accountable moderation roles over time, treating the job as real work deserving real structure, not a favor extracted from whoever was willing to do it for free.

Sustainable, ethical funding was the third principle, aimed at removing the exact conflict of interest that had driven the fork in the first place: advertising and provider relationships that didn't come with the kind of quiet influence over moderation decisions that Anthony Smith believed had corrupted LowEndTalk's governance. And practically, the forum was built on Vanilla, deliberately familiar software, chosen to lower the friction for LET members considering the move, rather than asking them to learn an unfamiliar platform on top of everything else being asked of them.

The forum's eventual, informal ethos distills all of this into three words, stated plainly in its own FAQ:

"Don't be a dick."

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LowEndSpirit's entire moderation ethos, stated plainly in its own FAQ

It sounds almost too simple to be a real governance philosophy, and that's partly the point, after years inside a platform where the actual rules seemed to bend around who was paying for advertising, a community built around one honest, universally applicable standard was itself a form of relief. The next section covers what that principle actually looked like once it had to be enforced in practice, not just stated as an aspiration.

What LES does differently, concretely

No pay-to-post, no hidden offers: LES's moderation rules, enforced in practice.

A founding philosophy is only as real as what it produces in ordinary, day-to-day enforcement. LowEndSpirit's actual moderation, as described directly by current co-admin mikho, is in some ways more relaxed than LowEndTalk's, but relaxed in a specific, deliberate direction, not simply looser across the board.

The clearest hard line is on ad hominem attacks. Personal insults, the kind of low-effort hostility that drives away exactly the thoughtful, experienced members a technical community depends on, get cleaned up actively rather than tolerated as the price of an open forum. That's a direct answer to the "meme-driven discourse crowding out substance" decline Anthony Smith describes watching happen on LowEndTalk before he stepped away.

The second concrete difference is around provider offers. Any hosting deal posted on LES requires a "Hosting" or "Service Provider" tag before it goes up, no hidden offers from accounts pretending to be ordinary customers, a pattern that muddies exactly the kind of trust signal a budget-hosting community depends on to function. mikho describes this as an active cleanup effort, not just a stated rule: accounts posting undisclosed offers get dealt with directly, rather than left to accumulate as long as nobody complains.

The third, and perhaps most pointed, difference: LES does not charge providers money to post offers on the forum, in contrast to LowEndTalk's practice. That's not a small operational detail. It's the same underlying principle from the founding section, made concrete. A forum that charges providers for visibility has built a direct financial relationship with the businesses its moderators are also supposed to police, the exact structural conflict Anthony Smith's retrospective identifies as the root of the original governance dispute. Removing that revenue stream removes the incentive that created it.

None of this makes LES immune to the pressures every community platform eventually faces. The forum's own FAQ maintains particular wariness toward providers connected to ColoCrossing specifically, and names RackNerd's owner as an example of a provider tolerated on LowEndTalk but not welcome on LES, a legacy of exactly the history covered in this post's earlier sections. What it does show is a moderation philosophy that traces a clean, direct line from a specific, named grievance to a specific, ongoing practice designed to prevent it from recurring, which is a rarer thing in community governance than most founding mission statements would suggest.

Part 2 with these topics to be posted soooon