The slowly closing Open II

in which our Hero has some after thoughts and some self-centered thoughts on Prosebox.net

[Infinite Ocean] noted on my look at Prosebox.net that unlike a lot of the people talking about OD alternatives, that [Simple Mind] actually chose to act.

True, and admirable, and light-years ahead of the people who made a mailing list and set up a design committee. I respect the choice to act, and I think he’s done a good job so far. I offer my respect and admiration and I call it out again to make sure that point doesn’t get lost in the rest. But I still think that it is highly relevant that he’s not the first hero to try to save the ship. To my memory and experience, he’s not the second either, or the third. That’s just the attempts I know about.

I don’t raise the fact to diminish what’s been done, but I think it’s pretty important to understand what happened before, to understand what might have prevented the others from succeeding and what [Simple Mind] can do (or has done) differently to make it work?

There are some usual suspects for a new site to come up:

• Features: Give people something they’ve been missing and they’ll move to get it. But this is a journaling site. There isn’t that much that you can say is missing, and the missing pieces are edge cases, most attractive to smaller parts of the population, so it’s hard to come up with a must-have feature. Then again, Prosebook allows the idea of multiple chapters/diaries, in a way that’s creative and different from OD, and maybe that’s the thing that does it (or the first of many to come).
• Speed: OD is certainly inefficient, so speeding it up and making it work better on multiple devices would be great. But OD is slow-annoying, not slow-unusable. I don’t know that
• Communications: It’s about features too, but more than that it’s about patterns of behaviour. Clearly the Diarymaster stinks at it, clearly [EWS] is struggling valiantly in his wake. [Simple Mind] has a clear edge here, in that he’s communicating on Prosebox and here. But this is honeymoon period, for the users and for him as the admin. It’s exciting to have people on the system, it’s not dull and boring and repetitive yet. How will he do after a year, or five? Obviously we don’t know, so the only thing we can look to is what is he doing about it now. Which we also can’t really know because he’s still delivering the baby.
• Salvation: Very little encourages the growth of a new site like the death of a predecessor. If the OD were to shutter, I think the case for Prosebox (or the others) would be substantially made. The ongoing threatened demise of OD is certainly motivation for people, and having an alternative that’s actually being visibly maintained, that’s a powerful one. Of all the things that could make Prosebox succeed, I think this is the most powerful one. People are scared.

So maybe distress, disaffection and discouragement are the real killer features that will drive people away from this site to something new.

[Shamandalie] and [Infinite Ocean] both observed that Prosebox is a lot like OD was at the start, and that it can grow into something really good.

I think it’s a keen observation. Prosebox is a lot like an OD 1.0 (Actually probably more like a v2.5 for how much is already there). But we’re using OD6.0 in a Facebook age, which means that production websites are just expected to have a certain feature set.

Prosebox is not done. That’s the key point that I think everybody agrees on. But done is a subjective condition, and plenty of web services run half functional or half finished. Prosebox is in better shape than a lot of them.

So if you want to explore alternatives, Prosebox is worth a look. If it does what you need in a journaling website, then it’s done enough, and you may find it very satisfying to use. I’ll be sad to see you go because it’s a loss to the community here, but I understand why you need to go.

But Prosebox is not done. Not just that there’s work to be done, but also that right now it’s still an experiment. It’s a concept for people to try. [Simple Mind] has some work to do to figure out what and how a helpdesk will work, and how notifications will work, and what secondary channels will exist. None of these are hard things to do, and he’s clearly got thoughts in that direction so this shouldn’t stop you from using it.

The only real risk I see would be if he decided to shut down the experiment. I don’t think it’ll happen, but it’s just a touch more likely right now when he’s in this beta mode.

I don’t actually see OD shutting down as a real risk either, though.A note makes me think I wasn’t very clear so I’ll cover that part again. In the past it used to be expensive to run a larger web site, on the order of hundreds of dollars a month, potentially thousands of dollars for large sites. It was even more expensive to run the Microsoft platform that OD is built on (which was supposed to pay back in security and ease of construction).

Now, however, the place that actually hosts OD can do so for about $20 a month. The domain name costs about $20 a year. (Yes that’s expensive, but let’s just say). So. 1 year of keeping the lights on costs $260 a year. Just for fun, let’s double that cost, call it $500 a year, for things I haven’t thought of.

That’s costs. For income, an annual OD+ membership costs $30 dollars a month. So if you see 16 OD+ members at any given time, (not lifetime, just OD+), the site is secure for another year. Any three Lifetime members also means the site gets an extra year of life, but they only count once, so let’s stick with the 16. Just from the posts in the last 2 hours of posts, I found 8 OD+ members and as many Lifetime members. 8 in 2 hours means about 64 in the day for 1800 a year, as a fast and rough calculation.

I suppose I could gather more data. For that matter, the Diarymaster can always spend for more than he needs to, there are much more expensive ways to achieve the same end state. But with the size of the population, it’s almost a statistical certainty that OD is running in the black.

And if it’s running in the black, it means that turning the diary off is handing away free money. Sure the users are annoying. Sure the Diarymaster doesn’t seem to want to do any work anymore. But just leaving the thing to coast makes a little money every month.

I don’t say the OD is great. I don’t guarantee that the Diarymaster won’t shut it down anyway. But it seems a hell of a lot less precarious than everybody seems to think.

What happens to our entries if OD does go ‘dark’?

Well, it’s very much like you go to work, or school, or a friend’s house. You work on their computer, you save a file, you go home, and then you realize, I needed that. If you’re lucky, you might be able to plead with them to let you have access or to send you a copy.

But the reality is that if the Diarymaster pulled the plug, a piece of a server in a particular data center would be allocated to other things. After some number of days/weeks, the disk space would get reallocated and our entries go poof.

So if you’re worried about other people reading them, it’s unlikely that anybody else would get the chance, and more unlikely that people would bother. But if you’re worried about losing the data, back it up.

Is the situation so dire that we should actually start deleting our entries?

Really, it’s the same guidance for every site, for ever computer: If your data is important to you, you need to back it up. If your data is too important to allow someone else to read, you shouldn’t be putting it on someone else’s computer.

If you’re specifically worried about OD going down, you should do what you need to do. It’s always a risk. Sites shut down, some of them after weeks, some of them after years. Some of them entirely profitable.

But I don’t think OD is particularly frail right now. You’re free to disagree, Gentle Reader, but this is my read of the situation: If OD’s coming down, it’s a management decision, and not an economic one.

As for me, I’m just a little bit jealous. I’ve been one of the people thinking about building an alternative site that would be so clever and brilliant that people would jump over to it. But I haven’t solved some of the problems I want for a feature set, and time is limited.

The fact that [Simple Mind] has taken action kind of takes the motivation to play with this question away from me. He’s got a decent system and now all I’d be able to do is fragment the community further.

And yet, jealousy aside, not feeling obliged to build a diary project means that I can move to the next idea and that one has me kind of excited. We’ll see how that goes.