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This is a post that I have suspected that I was going to have to write since late December last year.
You will now know that SoylentNews.org is closing down on 30 June but things have not been standing still behind the scenes since we first became aware of NCommander's decision at the end of last week. In fact, it has been a very busy weekend.
A small group of existing staff are looking at alternative possibilities for a 'replacement' site to keep the flow of stories going and allowing discussions to continue. This is a big task, especially in the 38 days remaining in which to try to achieve it. There are several possibilities which spring to mind, Pipedot for example. I have reached out to Bryan but have not yet received a response. However, things as not as straightforward as they seem. The pipecode is written in Php-5 which some of you will realise is no longer supported. We do not want to become dependant on old software which cannot be maintained into the future; that lesson has been taken aboard and reinforced by NCommander's explanation regarding his decision announced today. There are other options but at the moment it is still a search for what is available out there today which also appears maintainable into the future.
But the first thing we need to know is "Is there still sufficient interest in having a discussion site such as ours?" Do you, the community, still want to have your daily dose of stories and the ability to exchange views with many others on this site? Are there any community members who would be willing to join us in trying to establish such a site? Your views are crucial to everything that we do over the coming days and weeks. So please let us know what you think about whether a site is still required with all the alternative technology available today that simply didn't exist 9 years ago. What form should a new site take? What changes to how we operate are essential for you to continue to remain interested in the future site?
Of course, it cannot be a mirror image of what we have today - which many will see as a good thing! But I hope that we would be able to transfer existing accounts, usernames and passwords directly to any new site that we create. We would also have to start with a relatively simple site and build on that over time.
At the end of the day we would have to restart the voluntary subscriptions but not immediately. We can raise some funds to see us get established without the requirement of a financial commitment from the community. Subscriptions were always sufficient in the past and I don't see why that would not be the case in the future too. The fact that we currently have enough to keep this site going until next year bears witness to that. We have also found that we can significantly reduce our running costs based on our current community rather than being ready for a major stream of new members which never materialises. I have no grandiose ideas of becoming a huge site employing our own journalists but just a community that enjoys the discussions as we have been doing for several years. Nevertheless, we would also be trying to build on our existing community which is beginning to happen on this site now that things have settled down.
So don't hold back - let us know what you think.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 22, @05:02PM (16 children)
This is my primary community for discussions of... well, anything. I'd like to see the community continue, even if the screen colors or interface details change - though I might miss the chunky old 5 point limited comment rating system.
I also participate in Reddit, and (grudgingly) a little Facebook, but collectively they get less than half of the time and attention I have put into Soylent.
>What form should a new site take?
Whatever the volunteers are willing to maintain. As I have mentioned in the past, I single-handedly moderate a low-effort sub-Reddit. Not suggesting Reddit is a drop-in replacement for SoylentNews, or that moderation of this community will be anywhere near as easy as moderation of my "cute pictures" community on Reddit, but... it has been a very low-effort platform for me to maintain for 12ish years so far, and if the technical upkeep is threatening to disband Soylent altogether, it's one very low effort option. Yes, Reddit will stuff your channel with ads if you become popular, but... my low traffic sub-reddit never sees system ads, and I only have to remove a couple of independent t-shirt sales efforts a week around Christmas season. I don't know where a Soylent sized audience would fall on that particular spectrum of nuisance attraction.
>What changes to how we operate are essential for you to continue to remain interested in the future site?
For me, as little change as possible would be the best.
>being ready for a major stream of new members which never materialises.
For me, a major stream of new members would most likely dilute the quality/value of the community. I don't object to a little growth / fresh members, but big growth would make Soylent more like those big sites that I put less time / attention into because: it just feels like a vast wasteland there.
Continuity would be best, for me.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 22, @05:14PM
Holy frosty piss - there were zero comments when I started writing that, and I doubt it was even 5 minutes before I submitted.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Monday May 22, @05:19PM
Seconded. Apart from one general news site, SN is my next trusted source for relevant stuff. Thanks to the "great reform" (mainly driven by janirok), SN has become civilized again and is a joy to visit.
SN: Contributed stories, moderation, journals, and of course, a highly intelligent community
(Score: 5, Insightful) by istartedi on Monday May 22, @05:31PM (5 children)
Whatever we do, please let's not make it a subreddit. I cut ties with reddit. I find it to be one of the more toxic places on the Internet, and the new UI is absolute shite--the very thing this site was created to avoid.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by istartedi on Monday May 22, @05:34PM (3 children)
OK, I just realized there was a "don't" there, but not a "do". How about a Mastodon instance? It's new, it catches a lot of traffic from people bailing out of big social media, and it's modern and well maintained by a large community.
Is there anybody on Soylent running an instance?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 22, @05:39PM (1 child)
I would suggest going with something that somebody has experience with. Mastodon looks cool from a distance, but what's it like to live with long term, really?
I know it's easy to have a bad experience on Reddit, just like it's easy to get mugged in Spanish Harlem, but... 12 years of moderating a small sub-reddit have been basically pain-free and very little work, for me.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23, @01:33AM
I'm guessing you haven't been to "Spanish Harlem" in decades, as it's not that sort of neighborhood anymore, and hasn't been fro a long time.
Can you even define the area you're calling "Spanish Harlem?"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 22, @05:41PM
There's also join-lemmy.org, FOSS complete with docker images and ansible automation.
Note that federation with social media is much like IRC of the olden days; you can run Lemmy all day and federate with your own load balancing/backup servers all day without federating with the overall fediverse. Which might be good? Or bad?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 22, @05:36PM
>I cut ties with reddit. I find it to be one of the more toxic places on the Internet
I used to live in Miami, and there were plenty of toxic places in the greater Metro area, but as my wife used to say: we stay in our bubble, and it is nice there. Reddit provides reasonably capable filtering tools, and that keeps me seeing mostly stuff I don't mind seeing in the "greater reddit community", and subreddits are very much like independently moderated sites onto themselves - as toxic as the community mods let them become, but many are not toxic at all.
>and the new UI is absolute shite
agreed, thus all my bookmarks go to: old.reddit.com - which is at least acceptable IMO.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday May 22, @06:36PM (4 children)
I think I would agree with most of that. I was about to write a comment in the NC post but withheld it to have a bit of a think about it. A lot of people had already said what I wanted to say anyway so it wasn't very urgent. If it was just Goodbye then I wouldn't want to digress anyway.
I was probably going to make some lame joke about what I was going to do with all my new free time. But then I realized that the time I spend here is hardly wasted as I do apparently enjoy it. It's somewhat relaxing and in that regard help with other things I have to do. I don't think Reddit would be a suitable replacement. I don't think I would follow there. Hackernews is very limited and perhaps a bit to bare for my taste. It wouldn't fill the SN niche either. There are a few others I do visit but they are language (non-english) specific so they are not really in competition in that regard. They usually run various forum codes from old to, not recommended either really. It feels very clunky. SN in that regards fills a niche of the mix of news, nerd and tech stuff that I don't think I really find elsewhere, not that I spent a great deal of time looking.
But in some regard I was probably going to ask if no one else had what the replacement site was and if anyone had any suggestions. But still somehow hoped that the next month wasn't just going to be tumbleweed and that something else would pan out. There would be one less tab to have to open in the browser, and that would be kind of sad.
As I recall it now we (SN) was not the only once to leave the green site. Were we the last holdout or remnant? If not is there anything we can do with those survivors?
I don't do change. So like now? Or as little change as possible. At least from a visual stand point. I don't really care what runs in the backend and I don't really have any expertise to offer in the area. But I don't want some fancy-schmancy UI running the latest things with browser extensions, script and whatnot. I don't care if it works on my phone, I'm not going to be browsing here on my phone anyway. Big pass on that.
Starting with the bare essentials and adding things you need later might be the best -- submissions, news/stories, comments, accounts/ac, some kind of moderation. While I don't use the IRC I guess it's a nice thing to have, don't know how much usage it seems. Journals is another thing I don't really use or read. But I gather they are at least somewhat popular or have a legacy to them. But slashdot had a lot of things and I guess a lot of them didn't perhaps age well, not only the code, so cutting them might not be such a big loss in that regard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22, @07:52PM
> Or as little change as possible. ...
Ditto. Add to the list, VT100 mode -- this green on black is, by far, the most restful tab in my Firefox.
(Score: 2) by owl on Monday May 22, @08:39PM (2 children)
comp.misc on USENET? This is where a third group of "Fuck Beta" green-site folks headed.
Sign up for Eternal September (or buy a commercial USENET package), pick out a newsreader [wikipedia.org] and start discussing?
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday May 22, @10:53PM (1 child)
I would be coming full circle if I did that. My first exposure to the Internet was USENET back in the early 90s, perhaps a year or two before the real Eternal September. "Why would anybody want the WWW. There isn't even a client installed on our Sun workstations, and Gopher has all kinds of information on it".
In hindsight, the admins probably didn't install the client for *reasons*. They knew. They KNEW!
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by owl on Tuesday May 23, @02:22AM
Unless a magic rabbit is pulled from a magic hat, then come June 30 we won't have Soylent anymore to use to discuss.
USENET has the advantage that no one needs to expend time doing "admin" work on USENET, no one needs to be a corporate president for comp.misc to become the "Ex Soylent space", and if you never want to see posts from X, just plonk them into your newsreader's killfile, and they disappear for you.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Tuesday May 23, @04:44AM
Yup. All that.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday May 23, @06:46PM (1 child)
While people may be adverse to Discord and it's arguably not a great place for a "News Site". There would essentially be no maintenance, I think? Discord is already used by a lot of people, but certainly wouldn't provide much in the way of anonymity. At least not so far as keeping people safe from bad governments is concerned.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 23, @08:30PM
Spoiler Alert: jarinok works with KGB and NCommander is an Interpol sleeper agent.
Honestly, how would you know?
The one thing I _am_ sure of: opening a TOR gateway and browsing "the dark web" is a great way to get on all kinds of watchlists, datataps on your landlines and trackers on your SIM cards.
The FBI only violated their rules for surveillance 280,000 times last year...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end