If there were any place to *go*, I'd help migrate a couple of my communities, or at least fork them.
That seemed like the obvious thing to do from the very beginning of this mess. It seems like a painful case of misplaced trust. Even if the prison (being at the mercy of a corporation) was decorated very nicely, it's high time for the communities to start a free life.
There are a number of challenges technical, financial and otherwise, but given how much collective knowledge is among the members of various communities I'm sure practical solutions could be found.
In my superficial understanding the only resource that's lost are the domain names, that will have to change. Content could hopefully be salvaged. Open source software solving the same problem is available: Askbot, Question2Answer, Scoold, Mamute, etc. All the lessons learned for community management, moderation, etc. can be brought along. There just needs to be a sustainable finance stream to cover hosting and related costs (platforms are available for the community to accumulate funds) and a governing system that will not end up creating another fork.
Also, I don't think the fork should strive to build another amalgamation of unrelated sites. The sites could be run independently on their own infrastructure, possibly with links to one another for easier discovery of different communities.
As this seems so obvious, I'm sure it's being considered, I would appreciate any pointers on where people could follow the efforts and potentially get involved. Or maybe at least learn why it's not as simple as it seems. :)
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Forking seems like the only long term solution
Date: 2019-10-17 03:48 pm (UTC)That seemed like the obvious thing to do from the very beginning of this mess. It seems like a painful case of misplaced trust. Even if the prison (being at the mercy of a corporation) was decorated very nicely, it's high time for the communities to start a free life.
There are a number of challenges technical, financial and otherwise, but given how much collective knowledge is among the members of various communities I'm sure practical solutions could be found.
In my superficial understanding the only resource that's lost are the domain names, that will have to change. Content could hopefully be salvaged. Open source software solving the same problem is available: Askbot, Question2Answer, Scoold, Mamute, etc. All the lessons learned for community management, moderation, etc. can be brought along. There just needs to be a sustainable finance stream to cover hosting and related costs (platforms are available for the community to accumulate funds) and a governing system that will not end up creating another fork.
Also, I don't think the fork should strive to build another amalgamation of unrelated sites. The sites could be run independently on their own infrastructure, possibly with links to one another for easier discovery of different communities.
As this seems so obvious, I'm sure it's being considered, I would appreciate any pointers on where people could follow the efforts and potentially get involved. Or maybe at least learn why it's not as simple as it seems. :)