Not feeling optimistic about BB move to substack. I use it to read Wonkette but never sign in or comment. Never explored anywhere else bc transphobia and Nazis.
Iād been thinking for a bit that after the election I should try to scale down my involvement on BB. Read books or do art or something instead. Iām not sure my kid seeing me on my phone so much is good for her and definitely not good for me.
Maybe this is the kick in the pants I need? Elsewhere has a much slower pace and feels like a safer place too.
ETA: the timing also seems like a kick in the pants. Right before what may be the most critical US election ever and definitely the election with the most personal impact. My kid has told us sheās nonbinary. Prefers we use she/her when not talking to spouse or best friends. If this election goes to Trump, we are going to need to figure out how to get out of the country
Ughā¦ how did we get to the point where we all have to think about these kinds of choices? I worry about my BFFās kid, Bean. They are safe in Minnesota right now, but if Trump gets elected, thatās not a guarantee. And my friend probably wonāt have the resources to get them outā¦ though Bean is a programmer and could probably find work abroad in a safer country if needs be. And I think that theyāre dadās new wife is loaded, soā¦ maybe theyāll be able to get out if they need to. But FUCK man, this is our HOME. None of us should be having to think like this.
Iām starting to lean in that direction, too. Justā¦ it fucking sucks that they did this, and week prior to the election, too.
Actual, when Bean came out as non-binary, they legally changed their name to Bean, since thatās what their parents (and all their friends and relations) called them. Good old Beanie! They are about a year older than Fiona.
I spent a couple minutes and found there was entirely too much friction compared to the ease of use of Discourse (and thatās not even going into the problematic aspects of the site as a whole). TBH the quality of the curated (#boing) BB postings has dropped so precipitously over the past year I doubt Iāll even miss it all that much. For a long time now only thing of great importance to me there has been the community and connections Iāve made there.
I put too much work into making the shift, just in case, so I wonāt delete it for now, but I took a few minutes to try to see how the BBS would work on Substack and came to the conclusion (which yāall have already mentioned) that it wonāt.
All the worst and much harder to communicate with the best is not my idea of an upgrade, or even a lateral shift.
I find I canāt make the āreplyā button work reliably. Also getting the same issue with the āmessageā button when I sent a DM, then tried to follow up with a second DM.
Not sure if itās an issue on my end, or on Elsewhereās side.
Also not sure if could just be my own constellation of privs as a Basic User.
Iām going to ignore Substack for the foreseeable future, and stick with Elsewhere, as it seems to be the quieter, less awful platform.
Thanks to @Tammi_2.0 for helping me to see this bOING-stack-ocalypse aka the ārapidly evolving situationā better, more clearly.
well, iām not crazy about the Chat setup, thatās for sure. but hey, if i just use it to read stuff, iām cool with that. the people in the chat sometimes rubbed me the wrong way anyway. itās best if i donāt even dive into that.
The site was jam packed with generative text prompts everywhere you looked. Highlight some text, AI prompt to rejig it. Every topic and search query tried to push you into using AI-powered nonsense. Iām sure there was more. I found it so disruptive I crafted a ton of Adblock rules to make it all go away.
So apparently I donāt get notified for @moderators. Maybe Iām not in that group for some bizarre reason. Iāll get that fixed. Itās pretty much a one-person show at this point, so you can also use @staff or just go straight to me instead. I mentioned a couple of options in the welcome thread, but Iāll do whatever they need.
Thatās extremely funny to me, given the shoestring nature of this place.
All are welcome. Well, almost all. Seriously, though, if we get a significant influx of new users, I could definitely use some help with moderation, and potentially administration as well. Letās see how it goes, but if anyone is potentially interested, let me know.
Thereās lots of features to Discourse that I can turn on if thereās enough interest.
I have extremely mixed feelings about the current state of AI. I have been reluctant to even bring it up here. I donāt think Iād ever consider using it unless there was a clear and unambiguous benefit, and that the community was in favor of it.
This is basically what a month of hosting this site looks like:
Add maybe $10/month for off-site backups and $10-20/year for domain registrations and whole thing is inexpensive enough that I can mostly ignore the costs.
There are ways that I could make it cheaper. For example, that āVolumesā line item is sub-optimal, and I should try to move that to S3 or something similar, but I havenāt gotten around to that. I could also (literally) run it from my basement, but I donāt think that would be a great idea.
There are also ways I could make it more robust. I could move it to k8s and make it more available and resilient, plus potentially easier to upgrade, but that has a hefty price tag. I could also move it to a colocation data center instead of a cloud provider, which would give me a lot more power for the price, but thatās a lot more upfront costs and labor plus itās much harder to move.
The idea of some sort of community funding has been floated before. I have thought about it, but it never seems like a good idea for either side. On one hand, I understand that Iām providing a service for people, and it seems eminently reasonable that those same people would place a value on that service. I get that, but at the same time from my perspective the value of this place is the people. Charging you for the privilege of doing all the work (that actually matters) seems completely backwards. I canāt afford to pay you all for your contributions, and even if I could it would also create all sorts of perverse incentives like exist in other social media platforms like Twitter, TicTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The least I can do is pay for the platform.
I havenāt looked into too deeply for the reasons stated above, but I think that Discourse has some sort of AI integration that you can turn on, so maybe thatās what BB had.
Iād been thinking for a bit that after the election I should try to scale down my involvement on BB. Read books or do art or something instead. Iām not sure my kid seeing me on my phone so much is good for her and definitely not good for me.
