Given many people are fleeing a much-loved but problematic place (heretofore known as The Greater Boingboing Diaspora), I thought there should be a fresh topic on how to avoid all that with the lessons learned.
Part of this involves content (ie topic etiquette), part is process (ie moderation or authoring), part technology (methods to generate sustained income for the site owners) etc etc.
So - given what some of you now know - how can we best support Elsewhere Cafe avoid the pitfalls of The Other Place?
I appreciate the enthusiasm and the initiative, Thank you.
For the immediate term, I donāt expect to see any increase in operating costs, but Iām going to be keeping on eye on them to get a better understanding.
There has been renewed interest in people contributing to the costs of operating the site, and I appreciate that, but I need to work through some internal conflict before I can seriously consider it, so please be patient with me on that front.
With regards to arguably more important matters, I think we can use this thread that started 5 years ago as a starting point.
Iām sure you are, but I do hope youāre keeping an eye on bandwidth costsā¦ I would think thatās likely to be the quickest chance of increase with the influx.
Itās in the clubhouse, which is TL2 and above. Sorry about that, I didnāt notice before I posted it. Thatās probably why it didnāt onebox eitherā¦
Iāll have to think about how we can take the necessary parts from that thread and bring them into this one.
No need to delete the thread. Iām not concerned about duplicate threads. That one hasnāt had activity in years, so you are absolutely not stepping on anyoneās toes. I just wanted you to see where weāve been so we can have a more productive discussion. No worries.
There is some serious firepower from all walks of life descending on this humble bbs.
Please treat the āextreme helpfulnessā @LockeCJ as good intentioned.
It might even deserve its own post titled āSo you just arrived from BB but hereās some things you should knowā¦ā to manage what must feel like a firehose of activity.
Some ideas that come to mind are having a tip jar as has been suggested so it doesnāt need to be a recurring thing, maybe a recurring payment but Locke doesnāt seem to see a need for that at the time, and maybe for fun if we ever needed to raise money for the BBS someone could make merch for us to buy and have the proceeds go to maintaining or upgrading things.
Okay, I have some thoughts about this. Iāll split them up so Iām not rambling completely.
On Costs
I am also willing to chip in to keep this place running given what I get out of it, Iām more than happy to put something back.
I know you say that costs arenāt an issue at the moment, but usage could surge from the influx of new people. With that in mind, it might be necessary to put in some policies to help us be more efficient with data use.
One thing that the other place had was a file size limit- very large gifs were limited by this. If this isnāt automatic, it might be worth activating this option within discourse.
Another thing that was done over there was to purge the oldest embeds every so often. If you looked at older posts with youtube embeds or gifs, they were eventually gone. This isnāt the best , but it may be needed as policy, in which case, letās be up front about it.
Orenwolf mentioned at one point that Group PMs were hard on Discourse, as they ended up with every user having a copy of every post to the thread. We might need to ask people to limit their use of these. or to refrain from dropping big embeds in them, or delete them after a while.
Power, responsibility, spider-man etc. There are no longer TPTB making capricious decisions that affect us all. This means that the responsibility of making those key community decisions now falls on the community. This will require maturity, responsibility and co-operation from all of us.
Remember the person. There is a person at the other end of every online interaction. If you wouldnāt say or do something to a person standing in front of you, then itās probably not right online either.
Respect People, disagree with ideas. Weāre not all going to see eye to eye all the time. Thatās Ok and expected. When we do disagree, we donāt attack one another personally.
Be Generous- allow that other cafe-goers may not be expressing themselves perfectly, or may be having a hard day. If there are two ways of interpreting something, and one of them would cause a fight, they probably mean the other one. Give the benefit of the doubt to others, and expect it for yourself.
Be humble. No one person is more worthy or more important than anyone else. Weāre a community of equals, not egos.
I was planning on sharing articles and things that i found interesting and hopefully create discussions around it. But yeah i donāt know if that needs to be in its own thread or if it can go in a general thread. I almost think that such things might be best in their own because conversation/discussion can get messy or confusing if people are having conversations about different articles/links within the same place, and some discussions for certain topics can be relatively long lived so cutting in with new things to talk about in the middle of that would be disruptive.
But perhaps there could be a themed mega-thread (ie: science, or politics, etc) that just compiles the threads for these articles/links so that people can find it easier, and not have discussions thereā¦ kind of like an index to find things at a glance. This was probably already done over at the old BBS, but i havenāt had a need to engage this much before so forgive me if this is obvious to you guys
Our general approach to that so far has basically been āyesā. For individual things that stand alone, a new thread makes sense, but (for instance) thereās only so many separate threads about something stupid Trump has done that can be stomached.
Hi everyone! (Waves from across an abyss of a couple years of lurkery)
As you can see from the main page, the trend has generally been toward the megathread, which I kinda vainly argued against a couple years ago. I find it much harder to stay engaged when ācatching upā involves mostly scrolling down somewhat wide-ranging topical threads looking for a more specific nugget of interest. The threads here became channels, and the actual channels (āJoy,ā etc.) are waaayy too broad to be useful.
I have always loved this community and the way it treats its membership has always put it far ahead of the olā Boingās way (which is why, once Elsewhere was founded, I never went back to the old place), but the one single thing I preferred about the old placeās setup was the, uh, threadcount. It was always much easier for me to find a specific discussion to interest me, and I could just ignore the threads that did not. I find it much harder here because the threading is so generalized.
But thatās just what emerged as the consensus. Yes, I am free to start as many threads as I want, but stillā¦ the current situation still feels inadvertently hostile to new engagement, as there is just so very much scrolling to be done to get remotely up to speed on just about anything.
And I know itās really too late to change that, but for whatever itās worth, THIS is the single thing that has discouraged my own engagement here.
The highlighted section represents an average day, with crawlers making up a disproportionate amount of the total. ~600 logged in user requests (not users) per day.
This highlighted section represents the busiest day so far since the new influx of users. ~22,000 logged in user requests per day. Thatās an increase of ~36x. As far as bandwidth goes, we generally use 1-2% of our 3TB/month allocation. If there is a similar increase in bandwidth usage, we should still have plenty of headroom under the current limits.
There are limits in place, but they may need to be adjusted. This isnāt a setting that I can just change in the UI, so Iāll have to plan for it. Itās on my list.
Unless Iām misunderstanding how embeds work, these should not consume any (significant) bandwidth towards the limit posted above. This content is hosted elsewhere, not Elsewhere.
Uploads, on the other hand, count against both the storage on disk, and the bandwidth transferred. Uploading a gif is necessarily harder on the site than embedding one from giphy, for example. Same for video; uploading a video is heavy, embedding a Youtube video is not.
This is something I need to work on, but I donāt think itās particularly dire either. Currently, all of the uploads are stored on a local disk. This both less flexible and more expensive. Iād like to move to s3 for uploads and backups, which should help with both issues. It should also have its own bandwidth, so that will be metered separately from the core bandwidth of the site, further making that moot.
I could see how that could potentially be slightly heavier from a DB standpoint, but for media/uploads, I donāt see how it would be different than a post in a thread.
This is true. Some people like big, long-lived threads. Others prefer short-lived, focused threads. My (and others) recommendation would be to create a new thread if you want to, and optionally link it to one of the bigger threads for greater visibility.
Iād have to disagree there. The large threads that do exist here tend to be either
A) focused on a specific person or event that all of the posts involve, with lots of things that refer back to the past and can use the context
B) collections of short, unspecific things that would be silly to have their own threads for
I donāt see how anything would work with individual threads for every gif in the gif thread, or every random grin in the random silly grins threadā¦ I definitely know I wouldnāt go through the mental effort of trying to come up with a title or worry about the space it would take up if I needed to do that.
And things like Trump or Muskās destruction of Twitter are ongoing shitstorms to the point that members have in the past expressed fatigue and a desire to step away from the whole thing.
On the other hand, individual threads are fine! Thereās plenty of things that have had their own threads in the past. If youāve got something that stands out as its own thing, go for it!
And thereās generally no need at all to ācatch upā with the larger threads, itās usually pretty easy to read the starting post to get the general idea and then skip to something current. Except for, say, the Random Silly Grins thread - then you absolutely must read everything.
[ETA] All that being said, Maybe some additional categories might be useful? But as categories get more specific, the likelihood of there not being a category that fits what someone wants to post rises as well.
Well, I just had a better look at the status quo, and Iāll have to agree that youāre mostly right. In any case, itās better than it used to be. I count 57 separate threads that have been active in the past 24 hours. A couple of years ago there would have been a third that number. So I stand corrected. I still think that threads like Whatcha Watching and Well This Is Interesting and Love In The Time Of Covid seem to me to be unnecessarily siloed off as topics that feel like they could encompass many discrete discussions, but since Discourse doesnāt seem to really use Categories as an actual sorting mechanism (I mean, it does, but itās always seemed intuitive to default to the Newest firehose rather than actually sort by category)ā¦
Ah, hell, never mind, itās fine. Again, much better than it used to be.
ETA: Iām just going to tend to start new threads unless something obviously belongs in an existing one, and if I felt another Category was warranted, I wouldnāt hesitate to add one. I just like that kind of sortable metadata and I hope I donāt step on anyoneās pseudopods by Donalding around like I tend to do.
