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

Reply to comment by raincoat in Idea for how Ramble can become the best (and maybe most influential) free speech forum by raincoat

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.