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I'm going to simply write this quickly now. I have had very long discussions with a member of the community known as kolie who has been negotiating to try and keep SN operational, and help provide a realistic plan for both rebuilding the site, and migration. I was approached after the shutdown post was put up via public contact information. He has offered help in the form of hosting, capital, and helping coding a replacement for rehash. He has convinced me that there are enough people in the community that it might be possible to pay down the technical debt.
I was asked to formally take the gun off SN's head, since it doesn't help recruit volunteers if there's a death sentence.
I am more than a little reluctance to do this, simply on the basis that there has been a long history on this site of saying "we'll do X", and then X never happens. The situation was also discussed prior with Matt, and quite a few other people before I finally made the decision after it became clear to me that the situation had become completely untenable. I spent weeks looking for an alternative before I finally resided myself that there were no other viable options. But sometimes you can be wrong, and sometimes you can get outside help.
One of my cited reasons for shutting down SN was that calls for help were left unanswered. However, said call finally got answered and came at the 11th hour, and as an unsolicited DM by someone who wanted to see the site go on. We have been discussing this at length since Monday, in a conversation that at this point has been longer than everything said in a private, staff channel for the last six months. So, I accept the possibility I can be wrong. More specifically, I hope I am wrong.
So, ultimately, I will put my faith in someone I have never met before. It might be absurd sounding, but that is ultimately how SN started. A bunch of people who never met coming together to make a replacement for Slashdot. I will take steps to keep SN going past the 30th. This may involve the legal entity changing, as the PBC already voted to dissolve itself. I will write more on this next week, since frankly, I need time to sit back and reflect. I also need to write some emails.
The staff have told me that they will not work with me going forward. For my part, the feeling is mutual.
There are also the facts that I listed in the shutdown letter. SN's codebase is effectively unmaintained since the departure of TMB. I've already discussed the state of infrastructure to death, but there's an objective truth here: SN's VMs were exposed to the open Internet on end-of-life operating systems for years and the database cluster had been in an extended failure with corrupted log tables. As I see it, the staff allowed SN to degrade to the point that it was about to entirely fail. As I understand it, they see me as acting rashly and irresponsibly in attempting to address the situation. I freely admitted I could have done better.
At the end of the day, the only worse outcome than a volunteer shutdown is one where the site is either compromised, or lost in a crash. SN was one hard shutdown from an unrecoverable cluster failure.
That is not a viable state of affairs. That is a liability nightmare that at the end of the day the PBC is responsible for, which was the basis on which I intervened.
Finally, I'm only still here because SN has never been able to accommodate people leaving, especially as no one has historically been willing to take over legal responsibility for the operation of the site. I resigned three years ago. SN needs actual governance by people who can ultimately say that Z, Y, and X need to be done, and have the ability to either have it done, or can help raise the money to help get it done.
So, I guess we'll see if miracles happen twice.
~ NCommander
(Score: 2, Insightful) by ilsa on Saturday May 27 2023, @04:48PM (6 children)
I haven't been following the SN situation because I browse this site much less frequently than I used to. Having just read the original shutdown notice, I can't say I disagree.
You can only run an operation like this when you have the emotional investment to see it prosper, and it sounds like that died a long time ago. And quite frankly, based on what I see, I'm surprised it didn't happen a lot sooner. I appreciate NC putting so much personal dedicate into this, but it's unfair to expect him to keep going if he doesn't enjoy it and it sounds like he hasn't enjoyed it for a long time.
The technical issues are certainly a problem and nothing short of a rebuild is going to fix that. This site is not that complicated compared to other stuff I work on. It will take a fair bit of work, but I don't see that as being insurmountable... provided people can be found to do the coding. And that's the crux of the problem.
I for one have zero interest in helping because this site is full of alt-right nutjobs who obliterate any interest in participating in this community. I don't even donate anymore.
People who are completely divorced from reality like khallow and runaway, instead of being permabanned like they should have been a long time ago, are allowed free reign on here to be as obnoxious and stupid as they want. Other diet libertarians, like Janrinok, are better but not by much. If I had the ability to block them, (and ACs while we're at it), it wouldn't be as much of an issue. But this site reveres "free speech" in the most toxic way possible (ie: I have something to say and I will force it down your throat whether you like it or not), which is basically like heroin to alt-righters. And as you right-wingers are wont to do, they've made this community toxic.
Hell, in the past, when I complained about incidents of bigotry (both outright and dogwhistle) on this site, the response from people was literally "Don't let the door hit you on the way out."
So now I only view the site occasionally to see what tech news comes up, and rarely engage in discussions. If this place shifts any more to the right, it should be renamed SoylentTruthSocial, and I won't be pour out a drink when it's gone.
(Score: 4, Informative) by kazzie on Saturday May 27 2023, @06:18PM
Did you try the approach of applying comment modifiers to friends/foes?
(Disclaimer: I've not used them, but that's because I haven't used the friend/foe labels in the first place.)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Saturday May 27 2023, @07:02PM (1 child)
The problem is that we all have different political views, or views on almost anything really. You seem to be saying that if we don't the same as you then we should be banned. The site was created to let people express their own point of view among other things. If you don't like it then argue against the point of view, not the person expressing it. Being a Trump supporter or a Biden supporter isn't illegal. I am a Brit happily living in France, and I think that both of your parties are right wing, certainly compared to the parties that stand for election where I am. I'll bet we both have different favourite colours. That doesn't make you wrong and me right, or vice versa. They are just opinions. As long as they limit those discussions to the journals I have absolutely no problem with them. You are not compelled to read them.
But bringing somebody's political views into a discussion about the site's future is very off-topic and trollish - so I will leave somebody else's moderation of Troll in place
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Wednesday May 31 2023, @10:46PM
You dastard!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tork on Saturday May 27 2023, @07:37PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2023, @05:37AM
Comrade, some of us still hold true to our Marxist-Leninist-Maoist principles. на здоровье!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Late on Monday May 29 2023, @03:59AM
"nothing short of a rebuild is going to fix that"
I wonder. I mean, I don't know anything, but reading over threads and glancing at the code the weakest point I see in the technology is the fact that mod_perl's long term future may be a bit hazy: https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=11129853 [perlmonks.org]
Then there is INSTALL, whose freshness isn't clear to me, giving very precise instructions on how to compile apache, mod_perl, which perl to take, (say, do you really need perl compiled with ithreads when using Apache's prefork (multi process but not multithread) multi-process model module -- the 1.3 like model?), and saying it's at Apache 2.2 and not 2.4 (still true?). Because I did Perl but never mod_perl or web dev, and because I have a philosophy -- probably bogus -- that projects should loosely define dependencies for developers and only tighten in on the exact versions on the QA and deployment side, I'm wanting to see if I can get rehash working in NetBSD with standard pkgsrc packages, but probably that will go nowhere. Anyway, glancing at the code it didn't look so bad to me. Better Perl than what I write, or so I'm told. Oh yeah, there's the occasional comment like "why can't we use the normal get database connection function here?" followed up with "damned if I know" or whatever but, you know, at least code bases I maintain that's how it goes. The whole thing is almost 100,000 lines of Perl. There's just gonna have to be some weirdness if it's not written by someone like Ovid.
Other than mod_perl I would think the Perl part could be continued fine if you had people who liked to program in Perl, which would appear to be a problem from some of the comments (have to hold my tongue -- Perl is actually still my favourite programming language). And mod_perl is not going to explode in your faces just yet. If you look at the apache thread linked off the perlmonks thread above, it seems at least to be on life support. There are a larger number who want it to survive cause their websites depend on it and they like it. Then (par for the course?) there is an unfortunately small number of actual mod_perl developers who can't commit serious time to it but are at least willing to do whatever Apache needs them to to avoid this attic designation.
I do maintenance programming. The outlines of these situations are always much the same. There's the old thing and two sets of programmers. One group wants a new thing and disparages the old thing. The other group twitch and mutter a lot but don't have much to say on the topic. If group one stays around long enough and has clout a new thing starts. New thing and old thing run in parallel for some number of years then either there's a Watership Down moment when bunnies of all kinds must make a run for it or else the new thing somehow actually does 75% of what the old thing did while having a nicer more modern UI, so old thing (if it's not hidden in core of new thing) can be retired.
Btw. I like your site. Whatever recent threads on Slashdot say your summaries and comments are way better.