Today marks one year since I launched podvibes.co. Just over a year ago, Musk bought Twitter and it seemed certain that the website was going to die (it may still, it's just a very long and painful death). Whether it survives or not, it quickly became clear that it was no longer a good place to network with other creators, a free place to advertise your work, or a safe place at all for people who aren't white, cishet, male conservatives.
The AD community was quickly fragmenting across a dozen different social network alternatives that were popping up. A handful tried Mastodon and found it difficult or concerning. I decided to spin up an instance that could be hopefully a little more intuitive and generally safer for the diverse population within the audio fiction community.
A year in, the vast majority of people who signed up have gone dormant, with just 15 accounts (fewer people) who even logged in within the past day, and just over 30 accounts within the past week. There have been a handful of quite active users, regularly posting to the Fediverse, and I hope that continues, because we need fewer platforms controlled and/or heavily influenced by billionaires. However, the bulk of the audiodrama community appears to have congregated on BlueSky, Tumblr, and Discord (the latter of which I also help run one of the largest servers for audio fiction creators, which you can join from https://audiodramalab.com).
Unfortunately, I no longer have the free resources I did a year ago. I have a couple people who regularly donate on Ko-Fi (who I thank profusely, and would not have made it this far without their help) and @MrF has been an incredible help in moderating (as well as donating towards server costs), but I myself don't have the time a project like this deserves, and no longer have room in my personal budget to keep filling the gap between donations and expenses. Should someone want to continue this work, feel free to contact me here or anywhere: my personal site is https://horrificnathan.com and that is my handle everywhere. I will happily transfer ownership to someone who shares the same values.
Barring that unlikely event, I will be shutting down PodVibes in 3 months, aligning with the Mastodon Covenant. The only reason I may shut it down sooner is if there are no logins for 2 weeks. I had hoped this would prove to be useful to a wider audience and am bummed to make this choice, but there are many great instances on the Fediverse, and the beauty of decentralization is you can still transfer your profile to a new instance (directions here: https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-another-server/).
Keep creating, everyone. Stories change lives. Thank you for telling yours.
