Website Updates StP will NOT be shutting down at the end of the year!

[eyes]

Hello everyone!

My name's Iris and I work with a small anarchist collective called MycoSystems, and we have been collaborating with Matt to take over the infrastructure and maintenance of StP in an effort to revitalize the forum and keep this community alive for the future. As of yesterday, StP has been migrated to our collective's infrastructure so Matt no longer has to bear the weight of maintaining the forum.

We've written a blog post on our site going into more detail about the specifics of this arrangement as well as some of our plans for improving the community for the future. You can find that post here:

Bringing New Life to the Squat the Planet Community - https://coop.myco.systems/posts/squattheinfra/

We are looking forward to getting to know y'all as we get more involved, and we hope to work closely with everyone here to make sure that any changes we make reflects the wishes of the community as a whole.

So it looks like StP is here to stay for a while longer! We're really excited to move forward, and we're happy to answer any questions people may have in this thread.

-eyes

 

[Brookeeeeeeeee]

Hey y'all, I wanted to drop a reply to say that I am also a member of MycoSystems and have done a lot of the backend development to get StP back up and running on our servers. To anyone who is interested I'm doing a write-up on our gitea and will be posting some updates that are a little more technically oriented for those interested.

As Iris has said here and on our blog we plan to move towards open source solutions in the future, this lowers the operational costs and makes things a lot more modular (if you're familiar with ActivityPub, we've been looking at services we can use to bridge StP with other anarchist and punk platforms). I also want to say that we're doing this to support Matt and the community as a whole, we don't want to do a big corpo take-over, as far as anyone is concerned StP will stay exactly the same until we can figure out a collective agreement on what everyone wants to see this website become.

We're just here to provide any resources that we have available

-Brooke

 

[Matt Derrick]

Hey everyone, as you can see, @Brookeeeeeeeee and @eyes have been kind enough to jump in and help out with managing the server end stuff for StP. Please send them your (virtual) love for the work done this week to move the website over to their servers!

Management of the server backend stuff has been one of the biggest things burning me out over the past few years, so now that these wonderful folks have been kind enough to jump in, I can assure you StP no longer has any plans to close its doors at the end of the year.

Additionally, we've been talking about some ideas for the community we all have, and I think all of us working together with you, the community, we have some exciting things to discuss that I think we all feel will advance the community forward and bring a lot of useful things to the StP audience. We will be making a separate thread/poll/survey to discuss these things and hopefully figure out what will be most useful to you!

If you have a moment, please check out @eyes' link in the OP above for some additional details on all that.

For now, be assured that StP will not be going away, and we all have @Brookeeeeeeeee and @eyes to thank for that.

 

[Scat]

Oh, cool! Appreciate everyone that had a hand in keeping STP alive.

 

[dissociatecrab]

I'm so glad you decided to do this! Yay!

 

[ali]

It's great to hear you are taking over the infra work from Matt, I know that was really taking a toll on him. Seeing as we are here and things seem to be mostly working, looks like a relatively smooth transition. Thank you!

One bug report: normally I get email notifications for replies on threads I am following, but that didn't happen with a response a few days ago. I know it's a pain in the ass to get all the setup done for mail delivery, so if it takes a little while that's fine. I do hope you keep the feature around, though, even if/when the migration to an OSS platform happens. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I prefer email over other mechanisms because it allows me to process notifications at my own pace, plus it's an open standard that's been around longer than me so I expect it will keep on working forever.

Hooking StP into fediverse would be great, since it lowers the bar for people contributing, although I imagine that will come with increased moderation load. Either way I hope that whatever comes next will continue to encourage long-form posting and not just short messages.

 

[Brookeeeeeeeee]

It's great to hear you are taking over the infra work from Matt, I know that was really taking a toll on him. Seeing as we are here and things seem to be mostly working, looks like a relatively smooth transition. Thank you!

One bug report: normally I get email notifications for replies on threads I am following, but that didn't happen with a response a few days ago. I know it's a pain in the ass to get all the setup done for mail delivery, so if it takes a little while that's fine. I do hope you keep the feature around, though, even if/when the migration to an OSS platform happens. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I prefer email over other mechanisms because it allows me to process notifications at my own pace, plus it's an open standard that's been around longer than me so I expect it will keep on working forever.

Hooking StP into fediverse would be great, since it lowers the bar for people contributing, although I imagine that will come with increased moderation load. Either way I hope that whatever comes next will continue to encourage long-form posting and not just short messages.

From talking to Matt it seems to be an issue with the mail provider that he's been using for StP, unfortunately that means we don't really have much to debug, sometimes it just works or it doesn't haha. But, we're still working on it and will have updates in the future, we might end up just switching providers to a more reliable host.


And, yes moderation will be a bit of a toughy, I think it's just something we're going to have to tackle when we get to it.

Hopefully to make that process a bit easier we are looking into the idea of a sort of beta system, so beta.squattheplanet.com will be a place where anyone can check in on things we're hosting but don't have fully operational yet (ie. peertube, matrix, discourse, etc.). Hopefully that interests enough people who want to moderate specific platforms so we can develop a larger base of volunteers before say Matrix is being used by a large part of the community.

By doing it that way we can roll out updates gradually, we want to give moderators and the community as a whole time to acclimate to changes as they come.

 

[Ynwdwndrr]

Hey y'all, I wanted to drop a reply to say that I am also a member of MycoSystems and have done a lot of the backend development to get StP back up and running on our servers. To anyone who is interested I'm doing a write-up on our gitea and will be posting some updates that are a little more technically oriented for those interested.

As Iris has said here and on our blog we plan to move towards open source solutions in the future, this lowers the operational costs and makes things a lot more modular (if you're familiar with ActivityPub, we've been looking at services we can use to bridge StP with other anarchist and punk platforms). I also want to say that we're doing this to support Matt and the community as a whole, we don't want to do a big corpo take-over, as far as anyone is concerned StP will stay exactly the same until we can figure out a collective agreement on what everyone wants to see this website become.

We're just here to provide any resources that we have available

-Brooke

Kind <3🙏

 

[AyeAaron]

That's good, this place is interesting

 

[sevedemanos]

interesting

i like the back to basics, cyberpunk/minimalist angle

i wonder sometimes why people dont just do email groups w/ opensource cybersecurity applications

before i got a smartphone i was sending out letters, reading zines

 

[Crazy Hobo Johnny]

GREAT! I am very happy that StP is staying! I don't have to go insane!

 

[Coywolf]

w00t! Thanks for the help y'all! Curious to see what this holds for the future of StP!

 

[sevedemanos]

Hey y'all, I wanted to drop a reply to say that I am also a member of MycoSystems and have done a lot of the backend development to get StP back up and running on our servers. To anyone who is interested I'm doing a write-up on our gitea and will be posting some updates that are a little more technically oriented for those interested.

As Iris has said here and on our blog we plan to move towards open source solutions in the future, this lowers the operational costs and makes things a lot more modular (if you're familiar with ActivityPub, we've been looking at services we can use to bridge StP with other anarchist and punk platforms). I also want to say that we're doing this to support Matt and the community as a whole, we don't want to do a big corpo take-over, as far as anyone is concerned StP will stay exactly the same until we can figure out a collective agreement on what everyone wants to see this website become.

We're just here to provide any resources that we have available

-Brooke

do you guys, the collective, have your own forum or are you all based in the bay area

 

[MetalBryan]

New accounts probably cops.

 

[Jimmy Beans]

I don't get a whole lot of good news these days so this is pretty fuckin rad. I haven't really commented on this situation all that much because I wasn't really sure how I felt about it and didn't have any words that seemed worth leaving. About a week ago @ali wrote this comment and it really resonated with me. Especially the beginning. I too felt that exact same way when the site was down. Even though I don't spend as much time on the site these days, I do still pop in quite a bit and I just haven't felt very in the mood to comment or write much but when I tried and the site wasn't up it felt like damn.. is this a brief look into what things will be like forever.. come next year? It bummed me out.


I've made a considerable amount of friends on this site. I have so many good memories that have taken place IRL with the friends I've made through STP(@croc & @Koala & @Shwhiskey Gumimaci & @beersalt & @Coywolf & @snailormoon just to name a few) and also some of those memories took place just by exchanging text with people in these actual threads themselves. I've had arguments here with people that I just straight up didn't like and we've actually become really good friends because we had this place we kept returning to and it gave us a place to work out our differences and the time to find things we did like about each other which led to actual friendship and camaraderie.


It's a dumb figure of speech but if I could have my cake and eat it too, it would have been for Matt to be relieved of the pressure and stress he's had on his back with all that comes with managing this site but also to still have this site online and cared for by some vetted and capable people who do have the time and energy to keep it going. It feels like that's what we got, so I couldn't be happier about all of this.

 

[sevedemanos]

I don't get a whole lot of good news these days so this is pretty fuckin rad. I haven't really commented on this situation all that much because I wasn't really sure how I felt about it and didn't have any words that seemed worth leaving. About a week ago @ali wrote this comment and it really resonated with me. Especially the beginning. I too felt that exact same way when the site was down. Even though I don't spend as much time on the site these days, I do still pop in quite a bit and I just haven't felt very in the mood to comment or write much but when I tried and the site wasn't up it felt like damn.. is this a brief look into what things will be like forever.. come next year? It bummed me out.


I've made a considerable amount of friends on this site. I have so many good memories that have taken place IRL with the friends I've made through STP(@croc & @Koala & @Shwhiskey Gumimaci & @beersalt & @Coywolf & @snailormoon just to name a few) and also some of those memories took place just by exchanging text with people in these actual threads themselves. I've had arguments here with people that I just straight up didn't like and we've actually become really good friends because we had this place we kept returning to and it gave us a place to work out our differences and the time to find things we did like about each other which led to actual friendship and camaraderie.


It's a dumb figure of speech but if I could have my cake and eat it too, it would have been for Matt to be relieved of the pressure and stress he's had on his back with all that comes with managing this site but also to still have this site online and cared for by some vetted and capable people who do have the time and energy to keep it going. It feels like that's what we got, so I couldn't be happier about all of this.

been here since 2012.. all the legit cool people have since disappeared or were banned. so pretty much neutral at this point. seems more a little techy clique now, which is also interesting. the internet has changed a heck of a lot in 20 years and the idea of traveling hackers is kinda cool

 

[Brookeeeeeeeee]

do you guys, the collective, have your own forum or are you all based in the bay area

We are based in Atlanta and most of our online presence is Mastodon, our blog, and a couple other websites you can browse in this (work in progress) homepage

 

[Jimmy Beans]

been here since 2012.. all the legit cool people have since disappeared or were banned. so pretty much neutral at this point. seems more a little techy clique now, which is also interesting. the internet has changed a heck of a lot in 20 years and the idea of traveling hackers is kinda cool

The list of "legit cool people" we've banned is incredibly miniscule. I don't think I even need all 10 fingers to count them. There have been a couple/few bans that I didn't agree with. I'll probably get a lot of hate for it but I'll name one. Older Than Dirt. I don't think he should have been banned. If I had the power to veto, I'd bring him back. I didn't agree with everything he had to say, but who wants a hivemind circle jerk forum anyway? I think it's good to exchange ideas with people you don't agree with. I want my beliefs and views to be challenged. I used to argue with that guy all the time and he annoyed the F outta me but I still protested his ban to no avail. But I really can't think of too many more along those lines.

 

[sevedemanos]

as this is off topic as per the thread, ill just name john payne, brian, windandtherain, odin, ironweed, that one guy that showed me where to hop south out of seattle, kokorodoko.. its been so long i cant even remember their handles here anymore.

 

[sevedemanos]

We are based in Atlanta and most of our online presence is Mastodon, our blog, and a couple other websites you can browse in this (work in progress) homepage

awesome. thank you