It is with great sadness that i write this. however The Admin team has parted ways. I have closed registrations, and disabled the option to create new communities. The server will be ran until the payments dry up (about ~1-2 months). We have tried to build a community for autistic people online. It ended up not working for which we apologize. Please do not go after the other team members. Some disappeared, some went their ways, but whatever the reason i wish them the best. If you have any questions, leave them here and i will try to answer them.
How much funding is required to keep the hamster alive, and is there a chance of putting together a new admin team?
Maybe there would be a chance of a new admin team, however the legal owner of the hardware has gone no-contact and the sysadmin moved on to other projects.
Oof. Yeah, ok, if the VPS account owner’s MIA, then… Damn. What about the domain? Does that also belong to the VPS holder?
I was only responsible for moderating content and the community so i don’t know exactly. I think the domain does also belong to them.
That’s a pity.
Down the road, I’d be willing to contribute to a hosting fund, or even shoulder the costs of a small VPS, but I’m probably 5 or 6 months away from being able to do so. And I’m not a sysadmin, so I couldn’t help there. But I believe in the fediverse as a network of more focused, community-first websites, rather than the “jump on one of the 3 big, generalist servers” model. This space was doing that.
I would love to see it attempted again.
I can’t take the legal responsibility for this, but I already run my own instance so if there’s anything I can do to help sysadmin-wise, feel free to reach out to me. I can probably find enough space on my server too if needed.
Damn. I still remember when aspiechattr.me went offline without notice. I never found a Mastodon instance i could stay on after that.
Moderating federated sites like these is a lot more work than people expect. Some of us have experience from the old internet, like forums, or even chatrooms, and these spaces are much more difficult than even large examples of those were.
If anyone on your Mastodon-based site follows some bad actors elsewhere, you get a flood of questionable-at-best material streaming in that you have to deal with. You have to moderate both your local community, and the rest of the internet, and that’s… Ugh. And then, when you actually do it, you get your users complaining about “censorship” or “petty admin drama”, when you just don’t want to host and platform bullshit that’s against your rules (or worse).
It’s exhausting. I’m not surprised most people in the position collapse and disappear.
