FYI: solid.community pod shutting down

Hi All

After a quarter of a decade the decision was made to shut down the
community pod.  There were a number of reasons for this, but the most
urgent of which was due to health issues related to the Covid-19 pandemic

Of all the options available to me, shutting down was the least bad.

It was quite difficult to run as a grassroots project given that we didnt
have any funding, didnt have our own servers, relied on others for source
code, and so on.

What started as my experiment to allow users to try out node solid server,
took on a life of its own.  If you consider that Google Plus with all their
resources lasted about 2000 days, and we, as a pod, lasted almost 1000,
that's quite amazing really.

I am sorry that it happened so quickly, I just felt there were limited
options.  There was a lot of work behind the scenes.  Given the rapid
escalation of the pandemic, something had to give.

While the data is kept safe and backed up, I appreciate it is disruptive to
have to change a WebID that you've invested time in. I have had to do this
myself and I know how painful it can be.

If there was some way for users to reclaim their webid or accounts, and it
was easy to run.  I'd be open to doing that, perhaps after the peak of
Covid-19 passes.  It would require a server tho, which we dont have at the
moment.

I'd like to thank everyone that took part in our journey, especially our
amazing admins.  All of whom worked skillfully and tirelessly for the
community, sometimes for years, without ever once being paid.

Keep safe, and hopefully we'll see each other safe and healthy after the
Covid-19 crisis has peaked

Best
Melvin