When we heard poddery.com was going to shut down, some of us wanted to continue running it. We have been working on a fund raising campaign and we are close to launching it. I would like all of you to join this campaign.
Agreed - Loomio is to discuss ideas for developing and improving the Diaspora network - not for discussion related to individual pods, and not for campaigning of any sort. Good luck with your quest, but please don’t use Loomio to campaign.
That is really eye opening comments. Thank you. I did not know pods have no role in diaspora network. I also didn’t know building community pods have no role in promoting diaspora. I also didn’t know such campaigns won’t promote diaspora. Thank you so much for enlightening me. I was mistaken all this time about diaspora.
Thanks @praveenarimbrathod for your request. I’m running diasp.eu since 2011 and our costs are higher than the donations… that’s bad but that’s it. I think diaspora should not ignore the business value… Sorry, there are not free servers available… we should think about this topic and we should be open for a discussion…
I don’t have a problem with promoting campaigns to help pods, at least through our social media. That being said, I think that having such big pods can be directly correlated to the cost of hosting a pod.
What would be really great would be to:
Provide methods for users to easily migrate from one pod to another.
Make it ridiculously easy to host a pod. Whether it’s through a third-party pod hosting service, an easy-installer with the documentation we already have, or your own distribution’s packages, it’s fundamentally important that the barrier of entry for people that want to use their own pod remain low.
Really, to some degree we should be encouraging the creation and growth of smaller personal pods, rather than big pods that have to handle the strain of many users.
Granted, the above is all easier said than done, but I think as a community trying to focus on growth, we should consider how that growth is done.
Sean, points 1 and 2 are being worked on already, aren’t they? There’s been discussion here on how to best implement full account migration, and people are working on installers for various platforms. Myself, I plan to set up a pod when it’s non-technical enough for me to manage and when I can migrate my current user account to it.
They’re certainly a focus of discussion right now; I think these improvements will replace the need for bigger pods in the future. That being said, I feel that part of the reason poddery (or any pod) might be having problems is because maintaining a large pod means more strain on the server, and more cost for hosting all the users that access it all the time.
By Diaspora’s very nature, there is no model for profit, and many pods survive off of donation. I worry that many of the big pods out there are already dealing with this problem, and that it certainly is not unique to poddery.
@praveenarimbrathod I don’t understand your comments, sorry All I said was that Loomio is a place to discuss about the Diaspora* project. You will be much more successful in raising support on a place with more users - eg Diaspora* itself.
@jasonrobinson , @goob , thank you for your suggestions. But I don’t agree with your points. If you want to stop me from using loomio for this campaign, you may propose a vote and I’ll respect the majority decision.
@seantilleycommunit it is wishful thinking that we won’t need big pods at all, at least for quite some years. If diaspora works nicely in shared hosting plans, hosting own pods might become more affordable, but with people needing a vps to host diaspora, it is not affordable to many people even if they are tech savvy and care deeply about privacy.
Well it might not look like discussion we have already had on loomio, but it is not well outlined how a typical loomio-discussion should look like.
For me this is a discussion about a part of the Diaspora-network breaking apart and the question if we want to do something about. And thus it surely belongs here, although it has nothing to do with coding and features.
@rasmusfuhse thanks! At this moment we would like help with the content of the campaign, the campaign text, video, website etc. I have given links to the drafts in the description. Once we launch fund raising campaign on indiegogo.com, any kind of publicity would help, posting on blogs, social network shares, hosting events etc.
@goob we got poddery.com running on latest code and we fixed a major issue of no photo uploads.
But as scheduled Joe Bivins would stop maintaining this pod after June 30. We’ll need to raise funds to buy a good hosting from July 1st.
I’m optimistic of raising enough funds to keep it running for next 3 years. This campaign has already energized the community in India. We already have 28 people in the campaign team. Hoping to take diaspora further though this campaign as every one asks us about diaspora when we talk about saving poddery.com. Come to #fosscommunity.in on freenode sometime and chat with us. Many people have been asking us even before the campaign launch about what we are trying to do and understanding how diaspora works. Many have promised to take the campaign to their friends and campuses. Looking forward to a festive month of celebrations for the diaspora community all over the world.
