commit 80c0e495d01f7709b5a16cbc8ecc308d8bc4fbc1
parent bc5f118f39111344cfba7bb25b6f182b97e25384
Author: ugrnm <ultrageranium@bleu255.com>
Date: Tue Mar 26 23:31:57 +0100
final proofreading real final 2
Diffstat:1 file changed, 49 insertions(+), 47 deletions(-)
diff --git a/on-not-scaling-lurk/index.html b/on-not-scaling-lurk/index.html
@@ -149,11 +149,11 @@ governance</title>
<p>Specifically, there are three interrelated ways in which the
issue of sustainability comes to play for post.lurk.org. First,
long-term sustainability of the project itself. Second, financial
- sustainability of the project. Finally, ecological sustainability of
- the project. All three concerns are interrelated and have been
- actively guiding us until now and will hopefully keep on guiding us
- going forward. These in turn touch on how to provide access to the
- instance in the future, how we will maintain the server, and what we
+ sustainability of the project. Last but not least, ecological
+ sustainability of the project. All three concerns are interrelated and have
+ been actively guiding us until now and will hopefully keep on guiding us
+ going forward. These in turn touch on how to provide access to the instance
+ in the future, how we will maintain the server, and what we
do with the threat of Threads.</p>
<p>In terms of long-term sustainability, the growth of the space is
a consideration, and in particular the change in social dynamics
@@ -163,7 +163,7 @@ governance</title>
That change is rooted in the tension between providing friends (and
friends of friends) a space to network in a rich and focused
environment, <em>and</em> maintaining that environment. On the one
- hand, we want to give many the possibility to join post.lurk.org and
+ hand, we want to give to many the possibility to join post.lurk.org and
the wider Fediverse, on the other hand, there is only so much that
we can do as a small collective to make a wider transition happen.
Culturally speaking, we also want to sustain the vibe of the space
@@ -211,7 +211,7 @@ governance</title>
<p>Until now, we did this is in a relatively unstructured way,
opening applications every now and then, and receiving suddenly a
huge wave of messages from people explaining to us why our instance
- is meaningful for them. Filtering these applications is one of the
+ is meaningful to them. Filtering these applications is one of the
most unrewarding and stressful things about this approach, all the
while having to make important but also, at times, arbitrary
selection. Part of the issue is because of the crappy interface for
@@ -219,16 +219,15 @@ governance</title>
outside accept or reject, for instance—but a larger part is based on
the arbitrariness of it. The secret LURK truth is more often than
not, people we found exciting based on their application turned out
- to not be super engaged (if at all), and likewise, people we had no
- idea about have become some of the nicest LURKers! Of course, we’re
- not naive, and this is a social process that is not that surprising
- in community building. The point is that we feel that the
- application method is not only stressful, but also doesn’t add
- anything to existing social processes emerging in online
- communities. Let’s try something else!</p>
+ to not be super engaged (if at all), and likewise, people we let in on a
+ whim have become some of the nicest LURKers! Of course, we’re not naive,
+ and this is a social process that is not that surprising in community
+ building. The point is that we feel that the application method is not only
+ stressful, but also doesn’t add anything to existing social processes
+ emerging in online communities. Let’s try something else!</p>
<p>One of the decisions we made in November 2022 is to cap the
number of accounts on post.lurk.org at 666 (keeping with our
- tradition of using Meaningful NumbersTM). The past years we stuck
+ tradition of using Meaningful Numbers™). The past years we stuck
with that and it has felt pleasant. And here is the plot twist,
starting now, we will automatically remove unused accounts. We will
warn (of course!) accounts that have not logged in for 12 months and
@@ -238,7 +237,8 @@ governance</title>
really—please send postcards, though. We will hand out invites to
you if you request them, but we <em>really</em> still want to
privilege both diversity <em>and</em> people that are not yet on the
- fedi.</p>
+ fedi. You will be for sure lectured about it once more by the helpful heron
+ when you ask for an invite URL!</p>
<p><img src="thecycle-small.png" /></p>
<p>It’s also important to say that, next to running the LURK
instances and its other services, we are also active developing and
@@ -281,12 +281,9 @@ governance</title>
idiosyncratic way of working, a weird governance model so to speak,
and we like it despite its highly artistic take on administration.
In the context of the ATNOFS project in 2021 we did some
- introspection and came up with an honest description of such a take:
- an “impulsive and time-constrained benevolent eurocentric
- oligarcho-do-ocracy”<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3"
- role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a>.</p>
+ introspection and came up with a description of such a take:</p>
<blockquote>
- <p>“Specifically in terms of governance, while it might be seductive
+ <p>«Specifically in terms of governance, while it might be seductive
to go for a democratic consensus-governance model, this can also be
a risk when it comes to starting out and establishing the space if
the group doesn’t have enough capacity. In order to highlight this,
@@ -301,7 +298,7 @@ governance</title>
to consider ourselves well-intended, and are willing to listen,
learn and do best efforts given our constraints. Eurocentric, as the
entire team is in one timezone, concentrated on four to five
- languages, and culturally homogeneous. Oligarchy,as the governance
+ languages, and culturally homogeneous. Oligarchy, as the governance
structure consists of a small cabal (a conspiratorial group) which
makes executive decisions. A do-ocracy, because decisions are made
primarily by people acting on something. Moderation decisions such
@@ -311,7 +308,9 @@ governance</title>
situations, non-trivial technical issues, or really large decisions
are actively discussed in the oligarchy. All of that does not imply
that we haven’t, for example, solicited input and feedback on things
- such as the Terms of Service to the larger LURK.org userbase.”</p>
+ such as the Terms of Service to the larger LURK.org userbase.»
+ <a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref">
+ <sup>3</sup></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Surely, there is an alternative timeline where LURK is run as a
super structured COOP using Loomio and whatnot to implement various
@@ -339,7 +338,7 @@ governance</title>
and Privacy Statement that, we felt, was strong enough. To reach
this point, we spoke both formally and informally with many other
LURKers and friends, but also learned from practice and from what
- other instances are doing .</p>
+ other instances were doing.</p>
<p><img src="mC-4HGEvTjCMi-lvo4u07g.jpg" /></p>
<p>Concerning financial sustainability, one of the ways we have been
receiving (and gladly accepting) a tremendous amount of support is
@@ -354,17 +353,16 @@ governance</title>
maintenance labour instead, and hopefully demonstrate the value of
such a tactic at a time when Big Tech and a misunderstanding of open
forms of software production have led us to believe that the digital
- commons are a thing falling from the sky. This is even crucial for
- us, as, like discussed earlier, we are often helping other cultural
- workers to run things themselves and pretending that the economic
- dimension does not exist is incredibly dishonest. (Post-)Free
- culture evangelism has to stop sounding like an obscure hypocritical
- pyramid scheme with only the most privileged able to play the game.
- To our surprise, soliciting donations has worked so far, and we have
- been using the majority of donations to compensate for sysadmin and
- moderation labour of the team. We believe we are one of the few
- instances where donated funds are used primarily to pay people,
- rather than cloud companies.</p>
+ commons and digital solidarity are a thing falling from the sky. This is
+ even crucial for us, as, like discussed earlier, we are often helping other
+ cultural workers to run things themselves and pretending that the economic
+ dimension does not exist is incredibly dishonest. (Post-)Free culture
+ evangelism has to stop sounding like an obscure hypocritical pyramid scheme
+ with only the most privileged ones who are able to play the game. To our
+ surprise, soliciting donations has worked so far, and we have been using
+ the majority of donations to compensate for sysadmin and moderation labour
+ of the team. We believe we are one of the few instances where donated funds
+ are used primarily to pay people, rather than cloud companies.</p>
<p>However, we also realize that this can raise expectations on what
LURK as a project will become, and we want to be explicit that we
are not planning to change the nature and scale of our operation. We
@@ -376,13 +374,17 @@ governance</title>
difficult as, probably for the same reason as LURK, has no formal
structure), or to useful Mastodon clients, or to other FLOSS and
related projects we rely on. We are still trying to figure out how
- we will make it work, and to be honest, it’s difficult to get a
- clear idea of our operational expenses in terms of labour, and as a
- result, how to best use the buffer. For instance, we’ve now noticed
- that it only takes a few days of technical or moderation clusterfuck
- for our buffer to empty very fast. What is sure is that your ongoing
- support in the form of donations will allow us to continue this
- fermentation of community server maintenance for the long term.</p>
+ we will make it work and it will likely take a couple of years before we
+ have something that works. Fermentation. To be honest, it’s difficult to
+ get a clear idea of our operational expenses in terms of labour, and as a
+ result, how to best use the buffer. Before asking for donations we spent
+ two years carefully writing down all the time we spend on maintaning LURK
+ infra to get an idea of how much labour would need to be supported. At the
+ moment we're still juggling with things. For instance, we’ve now noticed
+ that it only takes a few days of technical or moderation clusterfuck for
+ our buffer to empty very fast. What is sure is that your ongoing support in
+ the form of donations will allow us to continue this fermentation of
+ community server maintenance for the long term. <3</p>
<p><img src="sharecropping.png" /></p>
<p>Last but not least, at the intersection of financial and
ecological sustainability is the question of technology use.
@@ -424,10 +426,10 @@ governance</title>
<p><img src="i2l56pBPRxKNGJ6FJabDkw.jpg" /></p>
<p>One of the things we do on post.lurk.org to counteract this is to
frequently prune this cache on the server. That however, has some
- implications: only the most recent remote posts are visible, and,
- remote profiles that haven’t been interacted with in a while will
- not have avatars or profile headers. When we remove remote users
- from the database that have not been active in a long time, this can
+ implications: only the most recent remote posts are visible instantly, and,
+ remote profiles that haven’t been interacted with in a while will not have
+ avatars or profile headers. When we remove remote users from the database
+ that have not been active in a long time, this can
also mean that you lose followers. Or, to be more precise, the
“followers” counter will be suddenly lower, since you likely already
lost those followers as the remote accounts will have stopped using
@@ -451,7 +453,7 @@ governance</title>
from the configuration panel, and with all the clever LURKers
around, perhaps someone can make a masto2static script to serve your
glorious toots elsewhere (and perhaps this is something we should
- put some lurk funds towards or crowdfund?).</p>
+ put some LURK funds towards or crowdfund?).</p>
<p>We want to mention this because one of the big unknowns at this
point is whether we can continue running the server as we have done
before as the entire network grows in size. For instance, one way
