Hikari3.ch

hikari3 is an English anonymous image board, similar to sites like Futaba Channel, 4chan, and its many derivitives, but with a focus of being more laid-back and relaxed through a pretty tight knit community with a bit of moderation but trying not have something that's "forced comfy".

I started it on May 21st, 2023 and it continues to run (formerly by mom's credit cards) via college financial aid.

The primary focus at hikari3 is discussion surrounding chinese cartoons (anime), manga, video games, technology, etc. but these aren't the only topics discussed on the site.

Brief History

2023

March 2023: I am bored and put up a random jschan instance (unrelated) for me and my friends to shitpost on. Didn't go anywhere and dies off later that month.
April 23 2023: I start thinking that trying to start a new community would be pretty cool and fun so I start over and register hikari3.ch
May 21 2023: After much procrastination, I made a modified version of 8moe's frontend then started a thread on Heyuri.net/b/ (a board I was frequenting at the time) about my new site and from there, some other people posted it on other boards like danger/u/, the Post Office textboard, cudan, Kissu, etc. We start with 4 boards: /en/ - General, /a/ - Anime & Manga, /v/ - Video Games, /h3/ - Meta, and a secret unindexed board /b/ - Random (Way too much for a new site)
May 30 2023: hikari3 is featured on allchans.org in response to a request that I made for the site admin to put it up. I think this was really helpful since it seems that this is how a bunch of people found us.
June 21 2023: Site's 1st month of existing and emotes made by me and Kriemhild are added
June 24 2023: Fish creates the hikari3 Steam group that doesn't get used for anything for a billion years
June 26 2023: User named "japan" adds /jp/ - Japanese Culture
Sometime in late June 2023: hikari3 and wapchan become friend boards
June 30 2023: Cyclotrons adds the board /aca/ - Academic Topics after a short discussion on 4chan/sci/.
July 7 2023: Skelozard adds the board /t/ - Technology
July 9 2023: IRC channel (#hikari3 @ irc.rizon.net) created.
July 11 2023: Merged /a/ - Anime & Manga and /jp/ - Japanese Culture into /jp/ - Otaku Culture to reduce board bloat. Also we got raided by a certain site for the first (of many) times. I started doing daily backups soon after.
July 13 2023: Discord channel is made as well after liliumlongiflorum writes a working post notification Discord-bot. Users don't take too well to it because Dicksword.
July 21 2023: I keep forgetting this but we used to allow that anybody could create a board, but I disabled it because it's a horrible idea.
July 26 2023: hikari3 and kind.moe become friend boards after some reachout to them from Skelozard
October 10 2023: hikari3 gets a short feature in a YouTube video by Psychcool (Link leads to reupload since original was taken down)
October 14 2023: Fortunes are added
October 28 2023: Permanent sidebar replaces frames + new board /f/ - Flash
November 22 2023: A thread is created about some how we got a cracked version of Minecraft which leads to someone making a hikari3 Minecraft server
Nobember 23 2023: drust creates the first iteration of the hikari3 Minecraft Server
December 21 2023: /aca/ is delisted and its place in the board list is taken by /i/ - Oekaki.

2024

February 11 2024: The original hikari3 Minecraft server is taken offline and backed-up due to lack of activity
April 12 2024: Hikari-chan and Heyuri-tan make ~~hot sweet yuri sex~~ diplomacy.
May 21 2024: 1st Birthday - hikari3 manages to stay alive for 1 year and beyond. Many bills were paid. I got multiple formal complaints of Cheese Pizza from our host.
August 30 2024: The term hikarin is now used for the first time.
September 2 2024: Game night general thread is started by pwohmy on /v/
September 28 2024: First game night playing NeoTokyo happens
October 1 2024: Development on koshi, our new imageboard software begins, for us to switch from LynxChan.
December 21 2024: arithefirst reaches out and arranges with SheepishPatio's admin Lumeinshin to have hikari3 and SheepishPatio as friend sites.
December 22 2024: Marukos brings back the hikari3 Minecraft server from the backup.

2025

January 15 2025: hikari3 and RottingAngels become friend sites shortly before the site unfortunately shuts down.
January 16 2025: /b/ (which has been locked for over a year) was finally baleeted.
January 20 2025: koshi Rewrite is announced in news post and arithefirst (New developer) makes a thread about it in /h3/.
February-March: Literally nothing
April 1 2025: /pol/ - PARTY OF THE HARD VARIETY is added for April Fools. People going on expecting politics were greeted with threads about poles, fools, thread about getting banned, and images of girls pooping white fudge into ice cream cone.
April 14 2025: 4chan was pwned pretty hard and temporarily shut down as a result of it. This led to many refugees from various boards (mainly /jp/ I think) to post on hikari and other adjacent boards. This lead to hikari's activity going up the highest its ever been, having around 1,500 posts that April.
May 21 2025: 2nd Birthday - hikari3 Rewrite - koshi is finally finished (in a somewhat functional state). It is also hikari3's 2nd birthday, meaning we managed to stay alive for 2 years. Many bills were paid. Many debts were had. 4chan is already back earlier this month so activity sharply declines. Many bugs were found. /i/ listing is replaced with /h/ - 2D Ero.
June 25 2025: A BBS Chess Tournament is started by someone, with one of the first matches being hikari3 vs. Heyuri.
July 12 2025: An unnamed hikarin defeats pez from Heyuri in the first tournament match in what I consider a Glorious Victory. After this, the tournament didn't really seem to go anywhere.
August 19 2025: marzimin of Marzichan reaches out in a thread to become friend sites with hikari3, which results in another mutual cross-link
August 21 2025: hikari3.ch domain is on thin-ice due to the /h/ board having someone that loliconned too close to the sun. The trouble is with the domain registrar (GoDaddy) meaning a registrar switch will have to occur if /h/ were to come back. /h/ is subsequently taken off and /i/ is relisted.
September 8 2025: New captcha based on captchouli is rolled out.
September 15 2025: .onion link for hikari3 is also finally made.