xianc78 @xianc78@gameliberty.club

The death of flash was the death of a culture

In 2021, Adobe would essentially make the case for preservation and open sourcing software by activating the killswitch in flash. For infosec graduates pumped out at universities en masse, this was the best thing ever as all they saw in Adobe Flash were security holes. For everyone else online, this was a painful experience. By 2021, flash was really dying out at this point as the rise of mobile forced everyone’s hand. At one point the internet ran on it, big name websites ranging from video sharing sites such as YouTube to chat sites such as Xat or Tinychat used it, video was archived in the “flv” format, and entire ecosystems of animations and games ran on it.

But there was enough shit that still ran on it that I remember doing the “on computer training” (mostly on how to sell crap) for a wagie job and it was all written in flash. Oh and I had a shithead manager who wanted it done by so and so. Flash suddenly stopped working on the thin client we had been doing training on. I whipped out my old ThinkPad T43 and completed it at home, and watched with amusement as another new hire was wondering why the training wasn’t working.

In the 2010s, Apple declared Flash dead, and the entire industry followed Apple (but not before everyone made jokes about how iOS didn’t support it when the internet ran on it). Adobe did too, they didn’t want to fix security exploits so they killed it off by infamously coding in a kill switch in the later versions that would activate in 2021. Instead, it was replaced with HTML5 which was promised as a fix for every flaw Flash had, and fixed few of them. It was being billed as faster and more secure back in the day, and you were told to switch to it despite many developers not wanting to. Everything people bitched about from the Flash era is still there minus the plugin part. Websites are slow, you need the latest browser, and there’s still exploits (but now it’s in Blink/Webkit/Gecko instead).

What nobody seems to grasp in this argument is that the death of Flash was the death of a culture. Now sure, Flash is still kinda around in some form as Adobe Animate. It’s still a backbone of the Western animation industry, to the point that when Adobe tried to kill it the backlash was so intense within that scene that they reverted it.

What we lost

The big loss with the death of Flash was the culture around it, simultaneous to the deaths of the surrounding scenes that used it. Probably one of the final nails in the coffin for the online use of Flash, even after websites that tried to keep the flame lit switched to using the HTML5 clone Ruffle, was when 4chan sunsetted the flash animation board after the big hack a while back. It’s old, it’s dead, who cares, we don’t want to maintain another exploit vector. While swfchan is still around with a “rain” animation over it referencing this, there are barely any new flash animations or games being posted.

But most importantly, Flash was unique. Similar to other products such as MASL or Panic (for the X68k only) in Japan, you could cram special computer animations with audio into small files that could be shared over the slow internet connections of the day. Also just like Hypercard and Shockwave/Director, it was designed to make multimedia experiences easy to develop. What made Flash unique at the time was how it stored images: as vectors instead of rasterized.

As a result, if you weren’t jerry rigging Flash to do rasterized art or as a ghetto interactive video player (as some flashes did, for example a 3d video where clicking let you “switch scenes”), you could have entire animations in a few megabytes. In the late 90s, the entire internet was stuck on dial-up still. When DSL connections were a thing, that “1 meg” connection was still only 120 kilobytes a second. Internet that slow nowadays is what you expect to find at a fast food restaurant using the cheapest Spectrum plan with every employee watching TikToks on the free Wi-Fi. Even right before COVID in my area people are still stuck with DSL (his area still uses copper lines in 2026), and an online friend of mine a state over is still stuck with it!

But back then, that was the best you had in my area. Flash was perfectly optimized for a slow internet connection. On top of that, it was easy for someone who was more artistically inclined and less technologically inclined to fiddle with. It spawned a new generation of animators online, and many of them would go onto either animation jobs, become big on YouTube, or even making their own shows.

But what is most important is the file size. Anyone who has tried to run a video sharing site knows that the biggest issue that isn’t an issue that requires a law firm to handle is with video sizes. Video files are massive, and even though new algorithms like AV1 or H.265 are designed to cut down on space, not every device supports those. Oh, and you have to save multiple versions of the same file for each client and device.

Case in point, a famous flash animation was the “Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny”. The Flash file is only 3 megabytes and is rendered in real time in 4k. A YouTube upload is going to be massively larger. Sure, the audio is very “crunched” but it will load on your DSL connection, or dial-up if your parents are broke/don’t know anything about PCs.

Another cool thing about Flash is that just like a lot of viral file formats, the files were distributed as “.swf” files. Similar to how MP3 files or Panic animations could be spread around through file sharing methods, .swf files could be endlessly rehosted and shared in numerous places. While Newgrounds was ground zero for all of this in many ways, people could host files on their own sites or share them elsewhere.

Just as iconic is the game library flash had, all in your web browser.

The games

What really made Flash stand out was the game library. Everyone had Flash installed, and compared to some of the slow messes like Java or Shockwave that took forever to start up, Flash would start up fairly quickly. What is most important though is that Flash had this thing called “Actionscript” that was a scripting language for developers to code their own games on.

As a result, Flash would become the iconic gaming platform of the 2000s if you were stuck with web browsers. If you didn’t know about Newgrounds, you’d know about sites like Miniclip, AddictingGames, and more. The important part is the virality of the flash platform, as all Flash games were .swf files they could be endlessly shared across the internet. Everyone, everywhere played Flash games. It could have been some quick tie-in game for their favorite TV show or toy line, or elaborate games that took over the internet. You played Flash games at one point, even if you played them on the WORST school computer of all time.

They were compact, fun, and addicting, but most notably got past web filters. If one site was blocked, you’d share the site that wasn’t. It was fun. But most importantly, it was a high-water mark of creativity and probably one of the last eras IMO in which people wrote games for the internet.

The problem was Adobe (and there’s no replacement)

The problem with Flash boiled down to the fact that it was a closed “standard” made by a single company, who had all the keys to the kingdom. While Java as a web-browser standard is dead and never gained the popularity of Flash, Sun open sourced it in 2006. Even with Oracle up to their tricks years later, the OpenJDK distributions are really popular and don’t have the same licensing drama. Unlike Flash, Java survived. In fact years afterwards, one of the most successful online games in history (Minecraft) would be written in it as a standalone game.

Flash did not. Flash was closed source, made by a company who ignored the effects of Flash on the ecosystem of the internet (other than “We’re making money” and “it’s not worth it anymore”). When Adobe decided to can flash, they coded a killswitch in and flipped it. They didn’t open it up, and in the end it died off. Ruffle would then boom in popularity as an emergency way to make content work in modern browsers and mobile.

The big problem is that HTML5 games just aren’t the same. On paper, HTML5 is way better than flash. It doesn’t need to deal with the cruft of a plugin, and with WASM it can do a lot more. Something I like to show people as a great tech demo is a Doom 3 port to WASM with the entire demo loaded in it. Back in the day Flash games were popular and animations and all, but nobody would have expected you to be able to play AAA games in a browser.

There are two problems with HTML5 games though. The first is that it lacks the virality of Flash games. HTML5 games have to be zipped up beforehand, and you can’t easily rip and share a HTML5 game like you could a flash game. On top of that, the bigger problem is that there’s a lot of issues with creativity.

The flash game ecosystem was loaded with creative games made by artist types. HTML5 games on the other hand don’t have the same ecosystem as Flash games did. A lot of the big HTML5 games I notice are “.io games”, usually designed for multiplayer as easily sharable games. Maybe it’s a sign of the times, as people would rather develop games in Unity/Unreal, and a lot of game developers seem to have forgotten the era of playing games on a shared PC from a browser.

A change in culture as well

The animators survived a bit longer too, but it depends on if you can go viral. Lately there’s been a revival in online animation with certain animators getting big online and people wanting to make the next Amazing Digital Circus or Hazbin Hotel. But there was a whole dark age for like a decade on YouTube after all the flash ones moved over, in which they were beholden to the sudden and out-of-touch ToS changes. Namely, YouTube had a problem with “reply girls” in which egirls with big tits would make low-effort reaction videos videos that would flood the site and with breasts as the thumbnail.

YouTube’s response was to change the algorithm to prioritize “Time Watched” over views and engagement to try to clamp down upon these channels. Those uploading short videos got burned by this, and they ended up promoting other kinds of clickbait videos. By pushing “time watched” over clicks, animators who made short videos got burned at the expense of other channels. Those who made slop video essays were rewarded, along with other styles of clickbait.

By the 2020s, this change had become so blatant that when MrBeast (the top guy on the site) had his production style guide leaked, one of the top metrics for his videos was “Average View Duration” or viewer retention. His mass-produced video style is engineered around this as one of the core metrics. Having tons of people watching your videos at once means that many will click on them. It’s the same reason why bodycam channels are so huge, they’re 20 minute videos ranging from the gamut from public freakouts to Liveleak level horror, and yet people want to see the dumpster fire which means they win the algorithm.  

In a way, maybe it wasn’t solely Flash dying out that caused these trends, but it sure accelerated them. YouTube definitely burnt animators and trends left flash games in the dust. The end result is that there’s a huge void of games that are as creative as Flash games were back in the day.

Nowdays, only the animators care about Flash/Animate (given how many piracy tutorials exist for old ones), and lately the craze is to use Blender for 3d. Just like how the move from 2d to 3d in studios made 2d very “unfashionable” (especially once TV shows began to look like 3d movies and not like early CGI music videos and Bowling Alley animations, I remember being blown away when the Penguins of Madagascar looked exactly like the movies to me) the rise of Blender has made 2d animations seem outdated to many. Especially since people can make stuff like that Pixar/Dreamworks movie that was never made.

It’s very interesting to see where the future is, but given I’ve seen revisionism on Flash I think it’s important to remember that it was yet another huge culture snuffed out by the centralization of the internet and being tied to a company that doesn’t like its userbase.

Very close to publishing - even got a slop mascot...

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Currently there exist great federated communication protocols, including SMTP, ActivityPub, and Matrix. There also exist powerful overlay networks such as Tor, I2P, cjdns, Yggdrasil and others. Even the DNS problem has been solved numerous times with Namecoin, ENS, Unstoppable Domains, PKT DNS, and others.

However, almost all federated protocols still depend on IPv4 and ICANN DNS (“the public internet”), because there’s currently no good way to federate across network boundaries. A federated network could choose to adopt another network as their official means of federation, and there do exist Fediverse nodes on Tor, but they are invisible to any node that doesn’t also run Tor, so their usage is marginal. IPv4 + ICANN DNS might not be anybody’s favorite, it’s still the protocol underpinning most federation, because it’s just something that everybody already has.

Here I propose SLUFI, a Simple, Lightweight, Unopinionated, Federation Interconnect. SLUFI is intended to embed in existing federation servers, have minimal configuration and administrative overhead, and enable bridging to any network that is capable of supporting their federation protocol - even those which don’t yet exist.

I should buy any Steam, GOG, or Itch.io game coming out the same day as GTA 6. Just to reward them for giving the middle finger to those rich bastards at Rockstar Games.

Just picked up the BattleDock for Switch 2! This thing is so cool, it adds a piece to the dock that replicates the look of a GameCube and actually has functioning controller ports! It has swappable faceplates and comes with all the retail colors :) Super sick. It's only $40 and you can use the code "GCG" at checkout for 10% off!
https://retrofighters.com/our-collection/battle-dock-for-switch2/

@xianc78 every "fake 3d" racer is dog shit. At the time Mario kart 64 was a big step up from that so I would say it's way better than SMK and Super Circuit but obviously it's still not good by today's standard

AI hate is kind of like "Elbows up" (Canadian thing) where most of the people don't actually have serious convictions and are just in it for vibes.

A lot of people with serious/rational objections are going to feel very alone when the hype shifts to other things.

@mansalia@social.maid.zone I saw the website and my immediately gut reaction was "Is this Drew Devault?"

Maintining a fork of a project that does not allow LLM code just because they might do so somewhere in the future when it can be done responsibly is a waste of time. Better spent actually forking rsync or something instead.