> tl;dr, Luke Smith is an internet microceleb who makes it a point to complain about modern life and being online, while being less online than he lets on. He is otherwise a typical right-of-center imageboard-adjacent entrepeneur taking crypto donations for projects, and those projects are polarizing because of their technical shortcomings and/or content, which may be seen as incongruent when his professed vs revealed preferences are taken into account.
Luke Smith, began his PhD. in Lingustics at the University of Arizona after earning his Master’s degree from the University of Georgia in 2015 [1]. Frustrated with academia and the tools at his disposal, he leveraged his linguistics background to produce a series of Unix shell scripts and wrappers around LaTeX, creating a set of dotfiles and environment setup scripts. Luke seems to have been annoyed by UI/UX complexity, and sought to simplify. Encouraged by positive feedback from places like 4chan/g/, he launched https://larbs.xyz in 2016, a deployable scripted method for ricing a no-frills Arch Linux desktop experience.
Growing disillusioned with academia, Smith dropped out of grad school in 2018, his final semester [2]. Around this time, he shifted focus to his online presence, producing video content about LARBS, older Thinkpads, and other Linux projects, with donations becoming his primary income source [3]. He began blogging about lifestyle using a custom shell-script system and launched an Alt-Lite/Generic Christian podcast, "Not Related!" [4]. In 2018, he also founded LindyPress to publish printed materials [5]. Between 2018 and 2022, Smith promoted Go-based Hugo for static site generation and Monero for decentralized payments [6]. In 2021, he bought a rural Georgia home, pivoting to a lifestyle where he professed being more offline while posting a lot online, and simultaneously seeming to sour on his own popularity and his detractors and emulators alike [7].
From 2022 to 2023, Smith toured the Monero and crypto influencer circuit, collaborating with bloggers and podcasters in what may have been paid appearances [8],[9],[10]. Afterward, he largely vanished from social media, citing limited internet access at his home, relying sporadically on Starlink for uploads.
However, in reality, during 2023–2024, Smith quietly developed JSChan, an imageboard software, and administrated an imageboard under the pseudonym 'Lute' [11]. He engaged in an obscure online feud with Soyjak.party, maintaining ownership of the domain jakparty.soy [12], and getting into stupid pissing contests with Soyteens.
The fact he is posting on YT again probably means he is going to be fundraising again soon.