This was bound to happen. No centralized VC-backed company could stay uncensored like that forever.
CivitAI already gathered all the growth it could, now it has to focus on making a profit and therefore pleasing credit card companies and advertisers.
Terms of Service Update We’ve updated Section 9.6 of our Terms of Service (ToS) to explicitly prohibit content depicting:
Incest
Self-harm, including depictions of anorexia or bulimia
Content that promotes hate, harm, or extremist ideologies
Bodily excretions and related fetishes, including;
Urine
Vomit
Menstruation
Diapers
And to;
Require all mature content (X, XXX) to include generation metadata. You’ll be prompted to add metadata when uploading new content.
Additionally, the following content depicted in any mature or suggestive context (X, XXX) is explicitly prohibited;
Firearms aimed at or pointed towards individuals.
Mind-altered states, including being drunk, drugged, under hypnosis, or mind control.
Depiction of illegal substances or regulated products (e.g. narcotics, pharmaceuticals)
Had felt like Civit was turning to shit the last few months, this just confirms it’s dead to me.
From a software standpoint, I don’t think that it’s likely that technically hard to clone civitai.com.
However, the models are not small, and I assume that whoever does so is going to need to have a way to pay for bandwidth.
Maybe punt the bandwidth problem to users, just provide magnet links to models or something.
The images and video are also gonna be at least somewhat bandwidth-intensive.
The best option here is a torrent tracker with a REST API attached to allow for integrations with places like the AI Horde and ComfyUI. Each person training a new model/lora would host it themselves, and the most popular would naturally have the most seeds. The problem is that CivitAI has millions in VC-money to spend on a fancy UI for discoverability and API and some randos just doing the same on their own cannot easily compete.
