Current situ from my perspective, and a rough run-down of previous events:
Server previously fell behind, emperor and I had discussions, tried contacting Tom, and discussed the new path with a collection of users off site.
At the 11.5th hour, Tom did the upgrade, and made myself and Emperor front-end Administrators. There was also discussion over us having back-end access, and the domain being transferred.
Because of the development, we put the new site on the back burner.
As far as I recall, we haven’t had any comms with Tom since.
The site is now versions behind again.
Over Xmas, when the feddit.uk went down, I stood up a new instance. However, Emperor is also not responding, and I am hoping to hear from him soon.
As we had planned to share the responsibility of the site, the new domain is offline until I hear from Emperor.
As I’ve mentioned a few times, the technical side of things is ready.
It’s the grown-up and legal admin that needs a rock solid footing before launch. And having that stuff is going to be the key to launching the site in a stable way.
IF we can persuade @tom to make one last effort to update to 0.19.1 then it’s possible to move your account to another instance. Obviously, the Feddit hosted communities would be run down. If we can’t as looks likely then you might be able to use third party software to transfer your subscriptions but it’s not reliable.
What would it take for Tom to share the super admin (upgrades really) powers? It doesn’t make sense for him to have these exclusively when it means the instance doesn’t get updated in a timely manner.
Does he want money? What’s the issue with only having a single person that can do this? Is it quirk of the way it was set up in the first place? Is there no way to transfer this ownership? Sounds like there’s a few members willing to pick up the effort.
How did he get in touch last time? If and when he does he needs to share or hand over these responsibilities. I can’t imagine he wants the community to rot, and if he’s too busy (fair enough) he should be willing to let others take over.
Definitely time to copy your subscriptions to another instance if you haven’t already!
It’s the communities I’m worried about. I set up three, which have kind of gone dormant over the last few months because I don’t know if there’s any way to migrate posts and content - haven’t wanted to post new stuff if it’s going to have to be migrated manually.
Yeah, the name is silly but as long as it’s a server with several admins and well looked after, I really don’t mind.
From what I understand, Tom helped Emperor rescue Feddit at the last minute way back when. Tom hasn’t been heard or seen from since and seeing as he has sole access to the server upfront, we’re kind of stuck, especially as everyone else upgrades to 0.19.1.
I had thought that Tom had given Emperor all the details and we had >1 admin now?
If Tom’s not interested anymore, then fair enough, but can’t the admins take on the server, it’s name, do upgrades, etc?
I totally understand that it’s all about time and money to do this and I’m just another freeloading user on this instance, but this is a crazy situation to be in.
From what I understand, the new admins only have limited web access to the server. Tom is the only one who can perform any software upgrades etc. So although we’re in a better position than last time, it’s still not good enough.
Quackhouse came about from an agreement in a matrix chat. The chat was free to join and posted on this instance. It was composed of people who wanted a new instance. We didn’t hold such a discussion publicly as to prevent people from domain parking.
We were wanting to distance ourselves from Lemmy (in name only, the devs are very volatile and give it a bad name, plus lemmy being difficult to explain to more casual people who’d appreciate the forum without an overwhelming technical explanation of how it works. Lastly we wanted a unique identity, like how beehaw or shitjustworks have) and Reddit (for obvious reasons)
We wanted a fun recognisable name, we did come up with ideas like “bri-ish” and I think something along the lines of “ukonline”. We tried a pub theme also with “localpub.uk” and “thelemmingandthed.uk” but people opted for the duck theme and “quackhouse” as it sounded fun.
Personally, Quackhouse wasn’t my first choice. But it’s what everyone was happy enough with come the vote, so that’s why I stand by it.
To elaborate more on the unique identity thing, we wanted to have a name we could use to spread in lemmy circles like joinlemmy.org. generally people who already know about Lemmy and want to join wouldn’t really care about “lemmy” being in the name. So we thought it actually could detract more.
However, then we had stage two: word of mouth spreading / promoting. Generally just tell people about the site, the unique name wouldn’t require explaining the fediverse, there was an idea floating about with “Tell them it’s a UK based forum with no trackers or ads and is donation funded”, they’d see the content from federation and by the time they realise what’s happening, they wouldn’t be intimidated by the idea.
Also had a small plan to even post a lemmy client on the play store which by default points to the new instance, name it after it and everything, just for fun :P
We were and are committed to lemmy, would only jump ship from it somehow died or became obsolete (there’s no plans on moving away from Lemmy being the actual software or any Lemmy features)
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