Congratulations to SoylentNews.org - now owned by its members.
November 22, 2024 8:18 PM Subscribe
On Nov. 15, web discussion forum Soylent News completed its transition from proprietary ownership to community control. Site admin janrinok reported, "After almost 2 years and a lot of hard work by many people, we have finally achieved what we set out to do. On Wednesday, the Linode servers were decommissioned, and the site is now completely independent and running on its own hardware. All the site data and the domains belong to the community - yes, you own this site."
SoylentNews, started in 2014 by site owner Michael "NCommander" Casadevall and others, was an extreme reaction to Slashdot.org owner at the time Dice.com's efforts to force their unwanted 'Beta' user experience on the community. SN uses their own copy of the free/open source Slashcode, formerly run by Slashdot. (Slashdot now runs on an extended and proprietary version of Slash.)
It acts as an 'alternative' Slashdot, run in a more privacy-focused, circumspect manner respecting the requirements its migrating community initially specified.
Over time, ugly conflicts broke out among SN member factions. NCommander stepped away from running the site, several leading users left or were banned, and unlogged-in anonymous comments were disabled.
With NCommander's attention focused elsewhere, the site repeatedly broke, with only him or one of the other departed founders able to step in with the necessary login credentials - the day-to-day site admins were not allowed that level of access.
After the site's database failed, certs repeatedly expired without replacement and other issues that no one working day-to-day on the site had the authority or login credentials to fix, several users hatched a plan to get the owner to let go of the site and transition it to a non-profit.
Their site is very light on comments these days and the stories may be a few days old. That seems to be exactly how they like it -- they visit the site mainly to read the posted stories. They also lean more to the right than MeFi, which goes to prove that having a voice over the governance of your favorite web hangout can be universal.
Check out the archive of posts in their Meta section to read about the details of their efforts. (Or at least try to; Slashcode's article search is a bit lacking)
NCommander previously
SoylentNews, started in 2014 by site owner Michael "NCommander" Casadevall and others, was an extreme reaction to Slashdot.org owner at the time Dice.com's efforts to force their unwanted 'Beta' user experience on the community. SN uses their own copy of the free/open source Slashcode, formerly run by Slashdot. (Slashdot now runs on an extended and proprietary version of Slash.)
It acts as an 'alternative' Slashdot, run in a more privacy-focused, circumspect manner respecting the requirements its migrating community initially specified.
Over time, ugly conflicts broke out among SN member factions. NCommander stepped away from running the site, several leading users left or were banned, and unlogged-in anonymous comments were disabled.
With NCommander's attention focused elsewhere, the site repeatedly broke, with only him or one of the other departed founders able to step in with the necessary login credentials - the day-to-day site admins were not allowed that level of access.
After the site's database failed, certs repeatedly expired without replacement and other issues that no one working day-to-day on the site had the authority or login credentials to fix, several users hatched a plan to get the owner to let go of the site and transition it to a non-profit.
Their site is very light on comments these days and the stories may be a few days old. That seems to be exactly how they like it -- they visit the site mainly to read the posted stories. They also lean more to the right than MeFi, which goes to prove that having a voice over the governance of your favorite web hangout can be universal.
Check out the archive of posts in their Meta section to read about the details of their efforts. (Or at least try to; Slashcode's article search is a bit lacking)
NCommander previously
They also lean more to the right than MeFi
Not difficult, to be fair.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:21 AM on November 23, 2024 [3 favorites]
Not difficult, to be fair.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:21 AM on November 23, 2024 [3 favorites]
soylent blue is people too
posted by lalochezia at 3:18 AM on November 23, 2024 [3 favorites]
posted by lalochezia at 3:18 AM on November 23, 2024 [3 favorites]
Certainly giving me vibes of the long gone, good old days of Slashdot (user id ~20k, yo). I can only hope that they are hosting on a Beowulf cluster.
posted by bouvin at 6:20 AM on November 23, 2024 [2 favorites]
posted by bouvin at 6:20 AM on November 23, 2024 [2 favorites]
Let a thousand flowers bloom, yo: I dont see a problem if people who share a (reasonable) viewpoint want to have a community. And more power to them to run it actively, with real moderation.
It's just when the Nazis show up that I would advocate for Cleansing Fire (TM).
posted by wenestvedt at 6:51 AM on November 23, 2024 [2 favorites]
It's just when the Nazis show up that I would advocate for Cleansing Fire (TM).
posted by wenestvedt at 6:51 AM on November 23, 2024 [2 favorites]
Glad to see the ownership finally reflect the fact that it is the people who really make up Soylent News.
posted by ckape at 7:59 AM on November 23, 2024 [11 favorites]
posted by ckape at 7:59 AM on November 23, 2024 [11 favorites]
Are there members here who are also members there? Could someone liase so that well-meaning but struggling MeFites could get some advice from folks who've just done this process?
posted by secretseasons at 8:08 AM on November 23, 2024 [1 favorite]
posted by secretseasons at 8:08 AM on November 23, 2024 [1 favorite]
Hah! Streams crossing for me; NCommander is a close friend of mine. They've been trying to get this process dealt with for a long time, and it's been a mess from multiple angles. One issue that MetaFilter may also end up having was that getting the rickety, ancient, extremely-picky-about-dependencies codebase ready to actually move to a modern server/OS was very tricky. At one point there was a server failure and even restoring from backup was a nightmare.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:13 PM on November 23, 2024
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:13 PM on November 23, 2024
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(Not really but sort of)
Well done Soylent News.
posted by Windopaene at 8:31 PM on November 22, 2024