The rise and fall of the Menfess

On June 8th, 2024, Indonesian twitter users woke up to find mass suspensions of dozens of beloved twitter accounts, specifically many automated accounts. This sudden purge drove many established groups to seek refuge in Twitter’s community tab or migrate entirely to Bluesky. You may or may not have heard the term, menfess. It has a relatively short but complicated history. Its origins are not well-documented but its current usage became extremely popular regardless. This essay is about menfess accounts, how they came to be, its mechanics and jargon, and what the writing on the wall says about them now.

Humble Beginnings (2013)

The first spike in trends for the term menfess was in 2013, according to Google Trends. Geographically it was clear that it concentrated in Indonesia. Sorting Google from oldest to newest yields a handful of abandoned twitter accounts and long-gone blogs. Its usage was still relatively niche and it would take years before the word entered the general lexicon.

Role players started using this term in late 2013. The Indonesian twitter and blackberry roleplay scene is not my field of expertise, but from what I’ve gathered it garnered a lot of K-pop idol role players with a handful of western celebrities thrown into the mix. With many role players wanting to make friends or even develop online relationships, not all of them were brave enough to message someone out of the blue. They wanted an anonymous confessions board to make things easier without direct confrontation. Thus, the menfess was born.

A portmanteau of “mention and confess,” users were expected to confess something via direct messages (DMs) and the menfess account will relay that information publicly but anonymously while mentioning the intended recipient. Accounts of old would have an admin manually sifting through DMs and copying and pasting the message to tweet one by one. This manual method, however, has its limits.

It’s important to note here that menfess usually refers to the submission or tweet, while a menfess account is the account posting these tweets on behalf of other people,. However for some, menfess could be used interchangeably as both product and producer.

Submissions could only be posted when the admin was awake and active. Sometimes they might have a backlog to work through, or maybe it’s less anonymous now that the admin could see and read your DMs directly. So by 2018 onwards, when the format was becoming more widespread and with new users learning how to use it, they had to automate.

Automation (c. 2018)

As more menfess accounts were made for different topics, the number of people interested in using them had also risen, rendering the manual admin days inefficient. There could be dozens of DMs being sent every minute all throughout the day, so they moved to bots. A system that could read messages automatically, filter out its contents, and send tweets all around the clock. The admins still have access to view all messages and those who sent it, meaning rule-breakers would be exposed and occasionally named and shamed. It was convenient for both the account owners, who make a profit from selling ad space on the menfess account, and users who liked the flexibility and responsiveness of the system.

Here is where most of our modern use of menfess stemmed from. Admins either set up the API (Application Programming Interface, the mechanism that lets you interface with an app or site) by themselves to interact with twitter or they could hire a third party service that sets up everything, including coding, and all they ask is for you to set up a developer account and pay them a pretty penny (usually on a monthly subscription basis). You provide the idea, they provide the coding nitty gritty. Notable providers for this service are biolbe and suvpen with the latter being more popular recently.

Quick aside: You may have encountered the term “autobase” in relation to menfess accounts. For our purposes, automated menfess accounts could also be called an “autobase,”A portmanteau of ‘automatic’ and ‘base’ — the same root from fanbase or userbase. This would later be truncated as just “base.” All autobases are menfess accounts, but not all menfess accounts are autobases.

The rules and outlines for this system are only slightly complicated. Let’s talk about how you would even begin to send one submission yourself.

1. You find a menfess account that piques your interest, let’s say literature-related. You want to ask for recommendations on a genre.
2. Larger accounts tend to minimize trolls by only allowing DM submissions from accounts that they follow. Accounts that are not followed back by the menfess account would be barred from sending DMs.
3. Try to gain a follow back from the large account, usually this entails retweeting a sponsored post or brand collaboration — or maybe they just ask you to give a book recommendation to prove you’re a legit human.
4. After gaining a follow from the account, reading the rules of conduct, you must find what is called a “trigger,” a string of letters, numbers, symbols or emoji that marks your direct message distinct as a menfess submission.
5. Using the trigger (that is unique to each account), you send a direct message to the menfess account along with your submission. This could be text, an image, video, or even attach your own tweet or thread.
6. If the bot does not detect banned keywords and you were quick enough, your anonymous tweet submission will be posted, usually in blocks of 5 tweets every 5 minutes.

Each menfess account and service provider came with their own nuances, but across the board the system was roughly: obtain a follow and then send DM including a trigger. Some menfess accounts made by and for university students may not follow you back unless you could prove you actually study there. Other accounts may gatekeep in different ways to reduce the chances of a troublemaker causing a fuss.

As the system became more advanced, some accounts advertised monthly subscriptions to be prioritized when sending menfess submissions. Some let you bypass certain limits or give you special privileges, like being able to send tweets without needing to obtain a follow-back from the account.

Although there are no hard lines in the sand denoting the different eras of menfess accounts, as one of the very few scholars on this subject, things picked up for the menfess account in 2020. You know why.

The Golden Age of Menfess (2020–2022)

With more people staying at home and limiting offline activities, many turned to social media sites. University freshmen used the menfess to ask questions when they had no way of making offline friends, people were learning new hobbies and getting into new media franchises, and many were using these accounts as a crowd-sourced answering machine.

Every 5 minutes people would be sending DMs en masse to these accounts, and your timeline would never be quiet. There was always something happening somewhere, and with the system being able to work on its own, it basically was a passive money-making machine. Prominent accounts could garner over a million followers in 2022, with many runners up already in the hundreds of thousands range. Well-known accounts made secondary accounts to prevent being overwhelmed by DMs while others made offshoots of other topics, under the same management, of course.

This attention was without its downsides though. The aforementioned business model where admins sold “ad space” saw many paid promotions that went undisclosed, masked as a regular honest testimonials. Other brands simply treated the account as advertising, to the dismay of admins that were not getting a cut of anything. Due to Shopee’s affiliate program releasing in late 2020 and no regulations with regards to disclosure online, replies were swarmed with affiliate links with no context.

All of that to say that wasn’t the major issue menfess accounts were facing. Menfess accounts, active with a large follower base and high engagement, were prime targets for swaying public opinion. Certain parties took to sending menfess submissions meant to share disinformation or provocation. These agitators were determined enough to stir the pot that they would ask help from unsuspecting people to “help” send submissions — people who could DM the menfess account. When the offending tweet was posted, admins would later take it down for causing “unrest.” One account in particular, collegemenfess, banned the practice allowing followers to send menfesses on behalf of other people, to crack down on the problematic submissions (to their credit, this is because people don’t read what information they relay to the bot. some were just relaying lies or baseless accusations).

It’s easy to see how a group of people could quickly turn a menfess account into a cesspool of political propaganda. Menfess accounts, at least the prominent ones, quickly gained infamy in some circles. Given the nature of these accounts, problematic tweets may be left up depending on the admins’ personal beliefs. This problem plagues all forum-based sites where admins and members constantly argue amongst themselves, but imagine if admins earned revenue from how many followers they have. Imagine getting paid to slip in posts that are intentionally bigoted in a manner that mimics a layman “just asking questions.” You could see why, in the next section, some celebrated its eventual downfall.

Musk (2022–2024)

In late 2022, twitter was acquired. This new change in leadership came with several new policy changes. For our purposes, three key policy changes helped chip away at the menfess machine.

1. Spam crackdown: In a folly attempt at abolishing spam bots on the site, twitter implemented changes that would flag accounts that tweet often and containing similar phrases. This initial move made admins and service providers limit the tweet quota even more than before. Menfess accounts would often be temporarily suspended and have to go on hiatus as to not raise spamming suspicions.
2. API access: Later down the line, access to the free twitter API was stopped; the only options were paid API access. Menfess accounts require APIs to work with twitter. This meant higher fees to run accounts and making niche, automated menfess accounts rarer than before. Popular accounts could gain that money back by doing promotional tweets while small accounts resorted to the manual days of the menfess.
3. Adult Content: Last but not least, recently it was announced that twitter allowed adult content — porn. It had existed on the platform long before this announcement was made, but it was an open secret. This concrete statement is important because of Indonesian laws regarding social media sites. To give context, tumblr was banned for several years because they allowed adult content on the site behind some safeguards. After tumblr reversed this policy and banned the now infamous “female-presenting nipples,” the ban was lifted (this was not because of the Indonesian government, it was more complicated and had to do with payment processors).

This was not to say twitter was free of government meddling for adult content. Accounts could be withheld in Indonesia when a “legal demand” was filed. This band aid solution was fine for the time, until that announcement came out. The ministry of communication (Kominfo) threatened to block the site if they did not reverse the adult content policy. Thus, the line in the sand has been drawn.

Those are the three important things I would outline when discussing the erosion of menfess accounts. Everything culminated in the perfect storm when the mass suspensions in June happened.

Suspensions often happened yes, but this sweep was sudden and it took not just one or two accounts out. It was a sizeable dent in the menfess bubble. Menfess accounts had been used to being temporarily restricted for spam-related suspicions in the past. Account owners had to balance out frequency, enough to satisfy users but not too much that it will alert the system. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough this time.

Admins were frantically making backup accounts, temporary halting menfesses being sent, or just moving to bluesky entirely. People who used these services were begging admins to somehow keep the menfess alive through one or more channels. Bluesky was a trending topic on twitter while the explore page for bluesky was temporary flooded with menfess accounts migrating simultaneously.

2024 and Beyond

Twitter is dead. While this article was being written, one of the popular menfess services, suvpen, announced they would stop developing twitter menfess accounts and pivot to bluesky entirely. Biolbe is still holding on, but barely. Suvpen cited the instability of twitter as a platform, rising costs, and the possibility of a ban as the major factors. The platform has become hostile to menfess accounts and its users.

Menfess accounts are still possible to create but you either have to a) sift through DMs manually or b) spend outrageous amounts of money to get API access and code everything yourself. Suffice to say, people don’t like paying for a service that was once free.

Not everyone is moving to bluesky. Some accounts that could manage it pivoted back to the manual days, with admins copying and pasting DMs manually. A handful of users are still too stubborn to fully migrate to another platform, especially those who have curated a following on twitter; so I’m sure there will always be a place for manual menfess accounts.

So that’s the story. How this once-niche use case for role players bloomed into both a community-driven search engine and a cesspool of bad actors, seemingly mutually inclusive. Now it’s dead. It’s not coming back, unless someone yanks away twitter from the guy who currently owns it. And somehow reverses all the collateral damage done. And somehow convinces advertisers back on the platform. And rebuild the parts that were abandoned or broken. And probably do something about the actual spam bots. But until that happens, this has been the menfess’ eulogy.

Author’s Note: My undergraduate thesis on linguistics was about internet linguistics and menfess accounts. In the process of research there were a lot of sections I had to scrap due to scope limitations and the fact that a lot of these splintered off into tangents. My thesis was finalized on December 2021; since then, things have rapidly changed at twitter HQ and affecting these bot-type accounts. I drew a lot of materials from that thesis for this article — though this part does not touch any linguistic theories. Nevertheless, I thought this history and deep dive into menfess accounts could stand on its own, and I wanted to add updates and developments with new policies being implemented on the platform. Lastly, I chose to refer to twitter using its old name because 1) that was what it was called when I wrote my thesis and 2) I do not respect elon nor his stupid naming conventions

There were other, even more tangential points that I didn’t include in this essay, if you could believe it. I didn’t go into how “txtdari[x]” was a popular “menfess-esque” system that debuted around 2017 on LINE. I consider it a precursor to the modern menfess, but I have yet to find and study a direct link from those two eras. Also, again, there is a txtdari[x] format on twitter that completely disregards the menfess system and just curates content from third parties, a departure from the LINE format! Alas, not much literature is available concerning these things. Hell, I haven’t even gotten to explain the times menfess accounts broke containment and some Americans accused them of being problematic. That’s a story for another time, if I do get the chance to talk about that. Sorry, this is a long epilogue.