RE: FYI: solid.community pod shutting down

Dear Melvin,


Thank you for all the time and effort you, the admins and other people put into running the community pod !
As you mentioned, keeping it up and running for that long is no small feat…

When you say a server would be needed, what would be the requirements for this machine ?
And/or would a crowd-funding be an option ?


Best regards and wishing you a speedy and full recovery,

Bart Hanssens

From: Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
Sent: zaterdag 10 oktober 2020 11:27
To: public-solid <public-solid@w3.org>
Subject: 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