Artisan Chat Succession
from Artisan Chat Status
As I've been suggesting was inevitable based on the previous post, mastodon.Art has booted me from the Discord (just a few days before the server was being closed anyway). Less inevitable: they've defederated from us, silencing our server from their end.
“Centrism harmful to marginalized communities.”
The private reason field, I am told, is simply Karen so, since this is purely about me and not any actual complaint about the instance itself, it's a pretty clear signal that they want me to step down. And they're by far the 800-pound gorilla in this – we have more follow relationships with them than we do with the orders-of-magnitude larger flagship instance, mastodon.social.
So that's it: I'm out, and actively looking for a replacement. It's not a great rush, though obviously for y'all's sake I'd like to get it done ASAP so you're un-silenced. I've set October 31 as the goal since that's the EOY for the LLC, and shutting it down before that saves the $75 annual-report fee for the next year. The instance has the money if that deadline doesn't happen, though.
I have been terrible at writing monthly reports so I need to add up what our money situation looks like and get back to everybody with it (it's pretty simple, shouldn't take long if Patreon cooperates), but big-picture: the Patreon/Ko-Fi payments cover the Mastohost bill with enough left over to save for when Patreon randomly decides to skip a month, or we need to increase our database storage, etc. I expect we'll lose some “I forgot I was still donating to that fediverse thing after I went back to Twitter” folks during a changeover, but I'm sure with a little encouragement enough other folks will step up to keep that going.
Beyond that, Mastohost covers almost everything technical. A future administrator will want to spin up their own LLC (they're not transferable) or local equivalent, get a little liability insurance and a DMCA contact/number (or transfer this one, if that's a thing), and set up to pay Hugo the monthly fee and... that's about it. There's a whole official Discord for server owners, and folks there will answer any questions you might have. All you really need to do is the one thing I've been terrible at: schmooze. Get Artisans to know each other, get outsiders to follow Artisans, start fun hashtag games, all that kind of thing. Put the social in social media, y'know?
If this could be you, ping me at @Artifex.
If not, continue to keep an eye on the announcements, which is where I'll be calling on you to make collective decisions about who takes over and how. I'll also announce them as @Artifex in case you're on a client that doesn't show announcements, so make sure you follow that account (and once you've done that, you can click on the little bell in its profile on the web to get notifications of when it posts).