Futaba
Futaba (ふたば) is an anonymous Yamataian imageboard founded in 1999 by Nishitani Hironuma. One of the most popular forms of social media in Yamatai, it has over 60 image and text boards dealing with a wide variety of topics, from daily personal problems to junk food, dōga, sports, ramen, otaku culture, pornography, and more. At its peak, around ten million users were accessing it daily, with a level of influence in society described as comparable to that of traditional mass media such as television, radio, and magazines.
In 2017, the site had an annual revenue of around 100 million En. It is the largest site of its kind in the world, receiving around 2.5 million posts per day. One major draw of Futaba is the total anonymity provided by the platform, with most of the boards requiring no accounts or registration to post images or participate in discussions.
Futaba has spawned a large amount of copycat sites, some of which cater to even more niche interests or host their own rival communities; online "board wars" between these communities sometimes occur, which sometimes escalate to real-world harassment and property damage of users. This remains one of the most controversial aspects of the site, along with the existence of boards frequented by extreme right-wing users who post highly xenophobic comments, often targeting Yeongseoni, Chanhanese, and Kannaguru people.
The sheer amount of users of Futaba has given rise to the phenomenon of the "Manpower Supercomputer", with the massive amount of users able to carry out herculean tasks such as developing software or locating a particular spot in Yamatai based on a blur photograph within record time. This 'power' is a double-edged sword, and has also been used for such acts as discovering and revealing the identity of individual users or carrying out mass denial attacks on certain websites.