The other thing about it being a Stonecutter’s lodge is that that lends itself really well to a subscription-based model where members divvy up the costs of maintenance (and maybe a buck or two?) instead of resorting to banner ads and native advertising. For a Stonecutter’s lodge, it’s easy to say “Congratulations, you’ve found us, but if you want to be in on this, you have to be interested enough to support the site.”
If that doesn’t scale, then so be it. The purpose is just for us to have a gathering place where the members are in the driver’s seat.
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As long as it doesn’t become obligatory.
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The board I modded had a chat feature and that always got weirdly flirty for any M-F interaction. There was one woman who had 4 men who independently revealed to me that she was their “true love.” No idea what was going on when they got on the Chat. But I think video kind of adds a layer of reality to it that makes it less prone to the oddness. I use Zoom a lot in my startup business. Just adds so much fun to a long distance talk to be on camera.
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@LockeCJ, do you have paypal? i’m just wondering how i could pay you a small amount to help defray expenses.
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Read Get your Vapes and Headphones here for an active discussion of how we are going to fund this site.
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I do, but I’m not sure how I’m going to handle that yet. We’re having some discussions about that. I’ll keep you posted.
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Do internal links not work right, or is that a trust level thing?
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I had a feeling I wasn’t doing it right, but I wasn’t sure the best way to link.
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I’ve seen this go badly wrong.
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13627120
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Ask me about the time my brother fell deeply, madly in love with a “lingerie model” who then “died tragically” while he was trying to take a trip cross country, missing our sister’s wedding, to say farewell to his one true love on her death bed.
TLDR: married, “lingerie” as in “Big Boobs Magazine”, not dead
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At least she was female then
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Oh, yeah, the “best friend” = her
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Another thought, a blog? or a thread that is blog like???
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I used to play a lot of MMO’s and I have a feeling plenty of people found out their MMO girlfriend was a Guy In Real Life when talk servers became standard.
I mostly played female characters just because I’d rather stare at their butt rather than some muscled dudes butt all game long. When guys hit on me out right I was quick to throw the dude flag. But I do admit there were more than a few times some guy would jump in and help my damsel in distress (hunting mobs way over my level) that I didn’t say anything.
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I don’t have any great answers to the questions right now - mostly I just want to get us talking about them and have answers to them before we discover that we needed to have answered them sooner.
From my limited experience running a Discourse instance, anyone can be promoted to any trust level manually. It may be worth creating TL3 status for the initial wave of known, trusted entities. Theoretically, any rando can sign up if they discover the site. Given that the reason we’re all here is to have a restricted space for the more intimate discussions, we may want to set that up sooner rather than later.
As I’ve been chewing on this, it looks like a fascinating opportunity for a self-governing community and would love to see us hash out a constitution of sorts, what our ‘council of elders’ might look like, and so on.
I’m happy to help fund the effort on a monthly basis, happy to help with the technical heavy lifting since that’s my day job anyway. Just want to make sure we get things properly nailed down and prevent this exodus from withering on the vine. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to see so many people here already.
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I second this emotion. I believer with Discourse it’s possible to set up that everyone entering gains a certain trust level. It might be easier to make that setting 3 for the next few weeks as people come over, then flip it to 1.
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A couple of comments on @messana’s post: feel free to move them to another category if they’re worthy of disussion.
- Presuming we manage to create a space where those very private, very personal details are revealed, what are the ground rules for protecting that information - both from an infosec POV as well as a PII/privacy POV?
In terms of privacy, I’ve found that clear policies on how often logs are purged and how passwords are hashed, and personal info is shared, etc. can be a big help in making people feel more comfortable. This is especially important if the site will be hosted in the U.S. during the Trump administration (a warrant canary might help in this regard).
- Who do we invite from the BBS to join? When and why? I’m not sure I would have ever made regular by popular vote and the fact that it happened just from being engaged with the community just felt right.
@tekna is compiling a list of users invited to the Regular Solutions - Meta pseudo lounge on the BoingBoing BBS for a reset – the list seems to meet the balance between inclusive and troll-free and contains a good mix of Regulars and non-Regulars. They should provide a good starting invitation base for happymutants.space. After that, perhaps just ask members here to scout for possible invitees back on Boingboing and submit their nominations for votes in a thread here. The invitations can be issued via PM back there.
- Is it worth the potential friction of creating something that can be perceived as a clique of ‘the cool kids’?
As long as the nomination/invitation process here is somewhat democratic, I doubt it’ll be a problem. If unknown quantities and known trolls on BoingBoing’s public are aren’t aware of this site, I don’t think this will be an issue.
Ok, really gotta pack for my trip. Later.
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I get that everyone is pissed at the guy, but I’m not sure that SLAPP necessarily applies here. “Happy Mutants” has been a BoingBoing thing for as long as I can remember (at least a decade) and I’ve never really seen it used anywhere else. IANAL, but in my mind at least, it’s clearly a part of the BB brand, and it seems reasonable that people could assume a relationship that doesn’t exist based on the Happy Mutants name.
I guess I just feel like if we’re going to do our own thing, we should actually do our own thing, including picking a name that’s true to our origins and values w/out being derivative. It’s like the old saw about being for something instead of against something. Anger and protest, while useful (even justified), will only get you so far. Sooner or later, what we’re about has to be something that people can positively support rather than reflexively oppose.
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