Governing Without Exposure: Feminist Infrastructures for Queer Digital Publics in Taiwan

Digital feminist communities rarely control the platforms they use. In particular, queer and sex-positive communities are often subject to opaque moderation on commercial platforms, which is exacerbated by legal regimes that treat sexual content as inherently risky. This paper examines a rare counterexample: a self-hosted Taiwanese queer platform with 35–50k monthly users that has operated without identity verification for more than a decade, while remaining welcoming to intimacy-adjacent content and functioning outside of mainstream social media platforms. The platform emerged in response to the overlapping issue of sexual minorities being harassed by outsiders, shamed within queer spaces and silenced or forced to self-surveil when discussing desire and harm. Over time, this platform has had to confront not only state and infrastructural pressure on sexual content, but also intra-community dynamics such as public call-outs involving the posting of screenshots of private messages as warnings. Initially appearing as tools to expose harassment and abuse, "screenshot truths" quickly produced secondary harms, including emotional pile-ons, retaliatory disclosure and durable search traces that hardened provisional allegations into long-term identity markers. Drawing on the long-term management of the platform, I present a model of harm along three dimensions – immediacy, irreversibility and misattribution – to demonstrate how exposure-based safety disproportionately penalized individuals who are already marginalized. Rather than framing safety as a choice between 'believing survivors' and 'protecting due process', the paper reframes it as an infrastructural design problem. Drawing on Taiwanese and US legal doctrines concerning copyright, privacy and data protection, I treat law as a set of product constraints rather than as ex post remedies. I then outline three complementary governance mechanisms: visibility gating, contextual moderation and recoverable safety. Visibility gating creates a public layer for literary and educational content alongside a non-indexed community layer for intimacy and discussion. This allows for selective invisibility while maintaining the platform's legibility to outsiders. Contextual moderation governs behavior rather than identity. It combines friction-as-design tools, such as reply pacing and cooling-off periods, with a 'mediated whisper' channel that converts individual reports into generic, behavior-based warnings instead of public screenshots. Recoverable safety employs temporary, educational suspensions under persistent pseudonyms, making sanctions serious yet reversible, and maintaining a structured path back into the community. Instead of providing a dataset for external auditing, this paper offers a practice-based account of these mechanisms through anonymized case studies and governance norms, such as intake workflows and appeal pathways. By anchoring its arguments in the everyday governance of a queer digital community in East Asia, the paper addresses the workshop's focus on infrastructures that support feminist communities amid intensifying legal and infrastructural constraints, offering a tangible example of how non-exposure infrastructures can render such communities safer and more resilient.