TechScape: why OnlyFans is pivoting from porn

Up for discussion in the Guardian tech newsletter: what lies behind Roblox's success ... the ongoing saga of Facebook's traffic transparency report' ... and Elon Musk's onesie' stunt

User-generated porn site OnlyFans will become ... something else, the company announced on Thursday. From 1 October, it will ban sexually explicit content", the material that made it a billion-dollar company and refocus on becoming a more mainstream social network.

For the uninitiated or those who are pretending to be, OnlyFans is, on a technical level, effectively Instagram combined with Patreon. Creators can post photos, videos and text to the service for their followers to peruse, and they can also lock any of those behind a personal paywall, and even charge to send and receive messages.