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What happens if Deimos can't host the site anymore?
I'm sorry if this was already answered in the docs somewhere but similarly to the question "What happens to my Steam games when Valve goes out of business?" I was wondering what happens to Tildes if Deimos can't sustain it anymore for whatever reason (e.g. death, prison, going off the grid and starting from scratch in Ecuador...)?
Is there some kind of backup plan in place?
The only person who can answer that question is Deimos. The rest of us can only speculate.
The last time this topic came up, I suggested a massive ARG treasure hunt that split a master password into five pieces and scattered them to the ends of the earth, and it would require cooperation and betrayal to gain control of all the pieces to become the new Deimos.
I assume this is playing off of Ready Player One, as that's pretty much exactly the plot.
In the end, you find that you don't want to be the next Deimos, but something different that has a girlfriend.
Why are you trying to murder my man Deimos? And after all he’s done for you by making this website?
Hey, I'm pro-Deimos until they start profiting off of poor people using their life savings to participate, and allowing corporations to use the site to amass enormous wealth through what is effectively slavery.
At that point, I'm not concerned if the next Deimos has a girlfriend or not, as long as they change that.
...with the last piece on Deimos, the martian moon.
Let's just hope the UAC gateways don't start spewing out demons. Then it's gonna be much, much harder to find it.
Harry Deimos and the five Horocrux 🪄✨ 🔥 🐉
I vote for moocow
That's cool and all but an escrow is a more frequently used process (for small business, code , auth, etc). I would like to see something like this for Tildes.
This might be a good time to mention that you can donate to keep tildes alive.
If I recall, he's Canadian. So more likely the reason for his disappearance would involve a moose or a goose.
I’d put my money on Canada running out of poutine and Deimos going to Ecuador in search of more.
I forgot about the poutine. Running out of poutine is a very dangerous game indeed.
What if he runs out of maple syrup to run the servers??
He'll just go outside and squeeze more trees.
I think that's how that works.
Maple Syrup overdose.
Who maintains Linux after Linus Torvalds took that life break few years ago? And who leads the Python development after Guido was hired by Microsoft? These are profound questions and it's up to the founders of these great projects to ensure that labors of their love not only get to see their own times, but also find deserving successors or lieutenants who will carry on that torch further.
That's what I'm saying. If not then Demios should find a worthy successor or lieutenant just like Socrates found Plato and Linus Torvalds found Greg Kroah-Hartman!
I think it’s still reasonable for users to ask what the succession/backup plan is, and to make an informed decision on whether it or not they’re comfortable using Tildes depending on it.
yeah the content would be lost, but the code’s license allows you to copy and host a new fresh tildes. It would be nice to have him put a back up team in place or something.
We do the same thing we always do. We find a new little place to settle down for a while, until that platform gets bought or burns down, and then we find another. AOL, MySpace, early Facebook, Digg, Reddit. Tildes, eventually.
I don't like it. Nobody likes it, but it's the way it works. Enshittification is real, and as much as we don't want it to happen, it will. When, nobody knows - but it will. No doubt about it.
Luckily Tildes has proven to be fairly resistant to enshitification like other platforms. Deimos has publicly stated over and over again that he doesn't intend to make money off of this, that it's a labor of love formed from his ideals. So basically unless something dramatic happens to Deimos or he cannot financially sustain it anymore, Tildes should be fairly safe.
That plan doesn't work should Tildes get larger. There will have to be multiple people working on the infrastructure maintenance. People will have to be employed. Big servers will have to be bought. So Tildes either treads water until it dies or it grows and changes.
Tildes trod water for the 3 years up to to May 2023. I'm not saying it could tread water indefinitely, but 3 years is a long time on the internet.
However, I agree that Tildes always needed some managed reasonable level of growth. (Right now, we've gone from one extreme to the other!)
Tildes hasn't grown into a multi database size yet. That is quite large of a site, but if we ever get there it will instantly require an operational team. Running concurrent databases is never easy nor smooth.
Sure. Yes. Absolutely. If Tildes gets bigger, it'll need to hire some people, to perform various duties. I wasn't disagreeing with that. In fact, that's probably somewhere on Deimos' plan. It just hasn't been activated because Tildes isn't that big.
I'm lost. You seem to be disagreeing with me, but I'm not sure what you're disagreeing about.
My main comment was in response to how Tildes has avoided enshittification. My argument is that Tildes isn't large enough to necessitate it yet, but if it becomes a large operation then it has to start making some money. That need for money is the catalyst for enshittification. Most social media endeavors didn't start out as greed fueled capitalist machines. They were pet projects by enterprising developers that got swept off their feet when they exploded in popularity. So maybe Tildes can resist better, but the real test hasn't started yet.
Ah. That makes sense. Thank you for spelling it out for this slow-poke.
I hope it doesn't come to that. I hope that Tildes can remain fully funded by community donations.
Enshittification is mostly a response to profit-seeking. As a site/app grows, its investors want a return on their investment, so they look for ways to monetise the site/app - which includes ads and other revenue streams, which leads to the enshittification.
However, as Deimos reminded me recently, Tildes is "run by a (Canadian) not-for-profit corporation, which aren't legally allowed to sell shares or distribute any profits, so it's impossible to invest in one". There's not a lot of scope for enshittification here, because there's no profit-seeking motive.
That said, Deimos could make himself (and his friends) an employee of Spectria (the not-for-profit corporation), and then look for ways to increase Spectria's income so that he can increase his (and his friends') salary. But I've never seen any indication that he's running Tildes for any motive other than personal satisfaction. As others have said, this is a labour of love for him. (However, if he does ever decide to become a paid employee of Spectria to earn some money from his efforts here, I don't think any of us could begrudge him that.)
My personal opinion. We move on to the next thing. Entropy isn't necessarily bad. Destruction can allow for creation.
Unlike Steam you aren't buying anything on Tildes and I'm sure the information here can be easily archived even if the site isn't going to be up forever.
I don't think it matters? He absolutely should have a plan in place for backups, power of attorney, a will, and all that. But even without that, if the source code is open source, then it shouldn't be too hard to startup a new instance of tildes on a new domain.
A proper plan would designate a next of kin or someone similar who could either take over or transition to someone else.
In short, don't worry about it! There's nothing any of us can do up until the point it's clear there is no future of tildes at this domain. After that, it'd presumably be easy to start over on the same framework.
dApps (decentralized applications), I asked and I’ve been told there is no plan for that.
No decentralization, but Tildes is open source: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes
the database and old conversations may not last forever, but if you really like the front end you can levy that with little issue. You can even use it for a dApp if you do the legwork to hook it up to ActivityPub or whatnot.
This is my thinking. Perhaps some of the more integral "power users" (for lack of a better term) could restart Tildes like a phoenix and continue development since it's open source. I suspect such an effort would require a donation drive by the community though.
Good call, I might just look into that actually.