Post #774460 by mike and marie on Sat, Mar 25, 2017 10:09 PM

Humuhumu wrote:

Here I am to toss my late-to-the-party post on the pile. Hello! I'm still pretty darned into Tiki in a heavy way, though I'm not around Tiki Central nearly as much.

Hey Humuhumu! I'm glad you replied---you're exactly the kind of person I was wondering about: a TC oldtimer who is now on Facebook, and not really so much here.

For whatever hundred reasons, I just can't get myself to do Facebook. For one thing, I see too much division there. Topics that are forbidden on TC are permitted if not encouraged there and it leads to no good. We know too many people who decided to end good friendships over something so dumb as having a different opinion. Not good.

FB will remain popular, but who knows how long that will last. I like Gott's theorem a lot. Applying it to Facebook, I really don't think it has all that much time left. People may have invested much of their lives on the site (in the past 5-7 years, that is), but they don't own any of it, they can't get it back, there's no guarantee any of it will be accessible in the future, and sooner or later people will wise up to that. Like you say, it's all ephemeral.

I use Slack ... just a few years ago it didn't even exist, and now in a group I'm on there's a large set of people who are on it basically 24-7, all on their phones. Well, we're finally leaving it for an open source system that we're hosting ourselves and that we can control---which is one of the greatest assets that TC has.

The elephant in the room: how much longer can Tiki Central last? What will come of it? I'm reluctant to put my tiki-information-sharing energy into a site that is at risk of total collapse. It's a great repository of information that can't be found anywhere else, but what happens when it disappears? I've agonized over this, but I've also come to terms with it.

I don't think we have to give up on TC if we don't want to---and I don't want to.

If we don't do anything at all, then we can expect it to collapse and then disappear.

So let's do something...

But I don't do it here, either, because I know how the sausage is made, and I know there's a huge risk of Poof! It's gone here, as well. (For a taste of that, just look at all of the dead image links on some of the best old threads.) So, I do it on Critiki.

(I've moved Critiki off of the server it used to share with Tiki Central, it's now on a much more robust infrastructure. The move of O-M to a similar setup is underway right now.)

You were (are?) pretty good friends with Hanford, right? So coming from you, this comment makes me a little bit nervous. Do you know how many backups there are of the TC database?

I've recently run sites on a server using TC's host and am familiar with its shortcomings.

I'm bummed by the loss of images here on old threads too. But I don't recall any of them actually being hosted here on TC---aren't they all old external imgur and photobucket type links?