Recently I’ve created a private forum and so far I’m very happy with it. It’s nice that our discussions are private, keeping data gobblers, programmatic advertisers, grifters and other schmucks like this out in the cold.
To be clear, I’m advertising the idea, not membership.
Is this coming from Wired magazine, aka the press organ of silicon valley? Big wows.
If we are talking about American adults, I guess they might be right.
Thank you very much! Now I’m tempted to pretend that I made those errors on purpose to find out who has the initiative and attention to detail required to correct me 🤣 But seriously, well done! That’s the spirit. I’ll send you a link to schedule the call in a PM.
Nothing to be sorry about! I love your proposal. Also I don’t know yet who the public will be.
Looks cute! Let me upload it for you so others can also chime in.
Personally I like it a lot, but it might be a bit too cute. We might have to do business with “serious corporate types”, so we might need to project a bit of seriousness too. But I’m open to hear from others.
I appreciate your input. As a side note, I don’t think Russia (nor USSR) was ever socialist, but let’s not get into politics here 😉
I’m super happy with all your responses. Across different fedi channels I got 25 positive answers and even more expressions of support. That’s more than I expected ❤️🔥 In a separate post I wrote a roadmap and will appreciate your constructive feedback. There’s also a logo I quickly doodled and I plan to use as a visual identifications for our project until someone with real talent provides something better.
I don’t see much reason why we shouldn’t operate in Canada too. One day it might be Europe anyway 🙂 We will have to discuss it when I gather some people. But if you want to try working with us and have some spare capacity, you are welcome to join.
Feelings are never wrong and I’m happy to read your feedback. The co-op is meant to be workers controlled and owned, so I think socialist connotation is not off. One of the early versions was like this:
I think it looks less professional but that might be subjective. Also, I’m not a real artist, so maybe someone can come up with a better thing. The big issue though is that it doesn’t scale well. We need a logo that can be used as e.g. a browser favicon without much modifications. With the current version it’s easy if we just remove the letters and center the shapes. Like this:
I just exported it from Inkscape with low DPI, so it looks a bit blurry. Probably the sharpness could be improved, but I don’t want to invest more effort before I get some feedback on the general design. The point is, that this simple design can be presented as a tiny icon and still be recognized.
I don’t know. There’s a lot of brands that use a five pointed star. Have you seen the Heineken logo? Also many political entities, notably the European Union.
I just did a quick experiment with replacing the azure with gold to see if it helps, but it just hurts my eyes 🤣
Thanks! Interesting take about pushing the parts away. I didn’t consider it. I guess this reading demonstrates the ambiguity of cloud. The tech of course can be (and often is) very useful. But at the moment cloud, mostly controlled by untrustworthy entities, seems more like a risk then a promise. So I saw it more as the European star breaking through cloud, like the sun often does, leading to better weather ahead. It also leads to a deeper question - are we more “anti American cloud” or “pro European cloud”. We will have to decide together. But you are right this design might evoke negative feelings of disconnectedness. Food for thought.
In the first phase I’m going to host us in my social club. TLSC is a private, self hosted and invitation-only instance of Discourse. It’s an experiment in creating something like a private LinkedIn, so should fit the purpose. I want to avoid the overhead of running another service so this can be our forum, unless people bring something better.
Actually my wife and I do self-host a Matrix server too. We use it to chat and call (mostly sharing links and grocery lists), but I don’t think it’s a great platform for organizing communities. Like other similar products it tends to get chaotic and noisy, and it’s very difficult to find what was said even few hours before. Good for real time communication, but not so much for thoughtful work or organizing information.
It does make sense. If you are thinking about it as a commercial service, then of course we can offer help. Currently I’m in the process of assembling the core team (see https://lemm.ee/post/58578768 for details). Once we are together, we will have to do market research and see for what kind of services people are willing to pay us. But we will almost certainly have people competent for such work.
If on the other hand you are thinking about your personal services, then I expect that within the co-op there will be plenty of mutual support and learning opportunities for that. But it’s important to remember that we are starting a business, so the first focus is to generate income.
Thanks for reaching out. Good luck with your exams!
Good to hear! I am just collecting a list of interested people and will be in touch with you and others shortly. Enjoy the evening!
Thanks, but would you elaborate please? I’m not sure how to interpret your question. If by “moving out of the cloud” you mean migrating to on-premises or self hosted solutions, then sure, I don’t see why not.
Technically? Not very much, but I’m handy with NixOS. The hardest part was the configuration of a mail server. I should probably blog about the setup process. But of course the real work is attracting people and keeping them engaged.