It’s been fun my fellow internet weirdos…
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So, going forward, I’ll not be able to VIEW any comments without paying substack?
Did Peter Thiel buy this site or something while I wasn’t paying attention?
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I wish that I had found boingboing a few years ago instead; spending time here and reading what others had to say I feel that I learned more than I expected to and enjoyed everything. This community looked really cool, and fun from the outside, I’m glad I took the chance to be part of it when I did but I’m sad to see it go away from what I liked about it. This place gave me a lot of hope for the future and I really feel my life was made better by getting to experience it.
So thanks for being a wonderful place with a lot of wonderful voices.
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Given the general tenor of the comments here (which I’m in accord with), I don’t see how BB itself will survive this change.
Thanks for the community.
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
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I’ve had some interesting conversations here and learnt a lot from many different people. I hope that my net contribution, small as it is, has also been overall positive.
Seems like all good things must come to an end.
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There’s little to rejoice about here.
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I’m staying here, reading the blog and BBS, till the end. This is not the first online community that I’ve stayed with until they were busy unplugging the hardware and turning out the lights. It also will not be the last.
I’m happy to pay if the new community is sufficiently similar in size, activity, and diversity, but that is not proven yet. Also not proven is the value that’s added by paying. What is proven is the many mistakes the new platform has made, and has not corrected.
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These weren’t the droids you were looking for?
Yea. Sigh.
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This is like, a bummer man.
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Whatever the reasons why this had to be, it feels like a death. Because it is one.
The community which exists here cannot exist on Substack for any number of technical and logistical reasons, even if large numbers of people didn’t have issues with it in its own right, which they do. Many people won’t go there. Many others can’t.
When this BBS goes RO, what was here will die. Something else will try to replace it on Substack, but it can’t: at best it will be something new and very different.
There was next to no warning, which is another shock. We are told that what we have is about to die, when we didn’t even know it was ill. It’s a shock, and a gut punch.
Change may be inevitable sometimes, but change can also be a small death, and people are hurt, and people will grieve what was, however it is replaced.
bOINGbOING is moving, but the BBS is to be buried.
Vale BBS. It’s been great.
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I honestly don’t know what the transition to Substack will bring, but I am really trying my best to savor these last few days of posting on Discourse.
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I haven’t been posting much recently, but it was still my favourite online community. I don’t believe it will be anything like this on Substack, and it’s sad to see it end. I wouldn’t mind paying, but killing off BBS means that it will not be worth paying for, and supporting platform such as Substack would feel unethical.
Thanks to all the wonderful people I met here. Your opinions (especially by @gracchus and @anon61221983 , and so many others too) have genuinely helped me become a better person.
If anyone has recommendations for any other online communities as cool as this one where I could lurk, please do share.
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Look, before I say goodbye for good, or subscribe, I do want to say this is the one social media I have felt most at home in. And I do feel this is a good case of “if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
Yeah, Substack has a racist/fascist problem. It subtracts from my experience reading Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From an American (which I discovered through this BBS, btw), or Lisa Schmeiser’s So What, Who Cares. It feels less like a bar, though, and more like a shopping mall where the owners are pretending it doesn’t fall under private property and don’t want to pay for security. Which means the nazis keep coming in because the ones able to chase them out are unwilling to put in the hard work.
I still haven’t made up my mind yet. Maybe because I can’t think of a place anymore that is an alternative.
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For clarity, will BB shop posts be cross-posted to the Substack? Some of us still mostly interact through the RSS feed, and they do pop up there.
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Rejoice? Really?
Sigh.
Bar closing of the BBS entirely, this is probably the worst case scenario here.
By paywalling off the BBS you’ll lose a LOT of commenters here, so you’re starting things out by asking us to pay for a greatly reduced community.
Then there’s the choice of substack.
Given thier links to the far right and the sensibilities of many of the users here, it’s either a mind-bogglingly stupid decision or one deliberately chosen to upset as many people here as possible…
That’s pushed me from “I doubt I’ll pay a subscription here” to “hahaha! …No”
And finally the timing.
A community that’s highly critical of a certain angry orange moron (and for good reason ) in the run-up to the US elections being suddenly paywalled off reeks of political influence here, to say I’m suspicious is a major understatement.
Either by management idiocy or malice, I think this’ll highly damage or destroy the community.
Let’s hope it’s idiocy as there’s a chance it can be undone later in that scenario.
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I initially came to BB for the odd stuff - at the time it was even a forbidden site at my job!
I stayed for the experience of sharing comments with like minded people.
I’m the epitome of the middle age cis white guy, and so are most of my friends and coworkers.
The BBS has given me the opportunity to interact, albeit remotely and in this virtual way, with an incredible variety of interesting people.
It’s been fun, mind opening (never a bigot, mind you, but people here gave me so much more perspective), and pleasantly relaxing, and sometimes infuriating.
I’ll miss this experience.
I’ll miss some of you with whom I felt a greater affinity.
I’ll miss the challenging of my views.
I’ll miss sharing my hikes and my music and my points of view, and the many opportunities at bad jokes.
Thanks to all of you, I’ve loved being here.
And that was the ‘me’ part.
I also think that this was a safe place for many persons that are challenged daily due to their being who they are - and this is incredibly sad.
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Since it’s the death of this BBS, we might want to look at evacuating. I’m not sure what thread/topic it belongs under.
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The Chat is not the BBS.
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