Rambler wrote on June 7, 2022 at 3:30 AM

I haven't forgotten about this place, though I do have regret that my focus being temporarily shifted elsewhere has negatively impacted RAMBLE. I've got a lot going on both in terms of my career and personal life.

I'm going to try to manage and balance my time better. I'd like to shift things back into gear here.

/u/raincoat , thanks for this post. Glad to see it.

raincoat OP wrote on June 8, 2022 at 8:35 PM

I get it. It’s really easy for tasks, errands etc. to pile up during times like that. Sometimes you have to block out almost everything except the most important and urgent tasks (and maybe hire or get help for some tasks). Don’t worry too much about how the site is doing. The functionality is good. I think most people report bugs so you are aware of them, not to put pressure. And feature requests are just ideas. The site has a lot of potential even with no new features. Guessing it might just need around 15 or 20 more users to really start taking off. An invite system could outsource the work of promoting the site, but it makes sense to postpone any coding and new users coming to the site until you’re less busy. Invite-only could reduce the regular bad actors but probably not the ones who emit a mysterious light.

Rambler wrote on June 9, 2022 at 4:01 AM

Well, there is still the idea of rebranding to https://otr.cx which is a domain I own that I'd like to put to use and I think is a better 'fit' for what I really wanted this site to be.

The thing about this site is the software that runs it is near prohibitively difficult to work with and is developed by someone who is completely against the idea of this site using her software. (It's open source and public: https://gitlab.com/postmill )

My coding skills are, well, pretty non-existent. Outside of some basic PHP and bash scripting you won't see anything created from scratch by me. And trust me, I've gone through the entire fleet of available projects found of github / gitlab as well over the last few months.

Unfortunately, anything like feature requests are just out of the picture at this time. If someone is actually capable of the task and wishes to implement some changes, I'll happily sponsor an adequate VPS for a non-public RAMBLE dev site.

Definitely a lot of unmet potential here. I'd like to keep the site more geared privacy and technology, but have it still be a source of news and discussion, even if it's controversial.

raincoat OP wrote on June 12, 2022 at 4:19 PM

I think the ramble.pw domain is really memorable. The “pw” makes me think of password, which fits since a lot of the discussion here is security related. OTR can stand for a lot of things. I’m guessing you might be thinking of “off the record” but others might see a url like otr.cx as just a series of randomly picked letters and not be able to remember it.

IMO it doesn’t make sense to make code open source and then get mad when people use it. Maybe she would feel better about it if you put something like “built with postmill” at the bottom of the page and put a link to the postmill repo. I don’t know why she’s mad though. Maybe after the community has grown more, some users who have a lot of experience with PHP can take a thorough look at the project and make the judgment call about whether it would be easier to continue with the postmill code or make something from scratch.

I think it’s good to have plenty of tech and privacy content. A lot of crazy tech related things are going to happen in the coming years. I think CBDC is the most urgent danger but there are also advances in AI, robots, gene editing, brain chips etc. that could be used in harmful ways by people in power so it will be important for there to be private censorship free spaces where people who are knowledgeable about technology can talk about these things.

If the site does evolve into something more broad, people can still follow the tech forums though. I think one disadvantage if it is too technology focused is that the site could miss out on some really interesting users. For example, a historian could come across the site or be invited to it and then after seeing the front page full of computer and privacy related links, feel like it isn’t the right site for them. I think some of the most interesting conversations happen when people from different fields and backgrounds come together to talk. For example, in response to some news article someone posts about the war in Ukraine, a historian, an economist, and a veteran discuss it in the comments. That’s probably going to be more interesting than replies from a few security researchers and Linux nerds. Another example, a programmer makes a post talking about a stock trading bot that he wrote. He might appreciate input from someone who works in finance or trading.