I’ll chip in a bit too.
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I think I can match what TechnoMistress is proposing. My finances have been looking a lot better recently.
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(Apologies for this morning’s downtime. I did a dumb thing. The dumb thing has been un-done.)
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Happens to the best of us.
As long as dumb things lessons can be used in order to avoid more dumb things in future.
An update on The Register :
Yeah. Pondering, but will likely take things down again pretty soon.
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I’m going to have basic internet after next weekend. I don’t have a computer right now, but one thing at a time.
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It is understood. No problems from my side.
You gotta do what you gotta do.
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To those about to disappear into the void, I salute you.
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There is a CoG Discord server. Chronicles of George
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Discord is irritating me. It recognizes that I’m logging in from a new location and wants to send me an email to verify. The link in the email is time limited and I don’t get the email until long after that period has elapsed. It’s a 30 minute delay, at least.
I’m sure I’ll get it worked out eventually.
Still, grrrr.
Texas law back on hold for the Supreme Court to consider it, along with a similar but different Florida law. Techdirt’s take is dead-on accurate:
Normally, this wouldn’t be surprising, and normally, this wouldn’t even require a blog post, but because nothing in the 5th Circuit makes sense these days, it is a little surprising and it is worth a post to note that despite the insanity of Judge Andy Oldham’s ruling putting Texas’ content moderation law back on the books, he has now agreed to put that ruling on hold while the parties ask the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Again, such a thing is pretty standard in lots of cases, but this is the case where, back in May, Oldham decided to say that the law should go into effect immediately without any explanation at all. That necessitated a rush to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, where the justices put the law on hold, in order to allow the regular, normal procedure to take place. As you’re well aware, months later, Oldham finally came out with his batshit crazy decision that required Oldham to ignore a century’s worth of precedent, as well as decades worth of conservative 1st Amendment orthodoxy in order to argue that the 1st Amendment’s association rights no longer apply to social media.
I have absolutely zero faith that this activist supreme court will do the right thing, because leaning into the bullshit lie of “conservatives are censored for their beliefs!!!oneoneeleventy!!!” resonates with people too stupid to understand how the 1A actually works, and those people vote (R). Constitutionality is something that lately the right only pays lip service to when it furthers their agenda of consolidating power and destroying democratic norms.
Still planning on divesting the forums onto a volunteer at some point at or around the end of the year, though. With the judicial landscape looking like this for the foreseeable future, it’s only a matter of time before moderating disinformation on the internet becomes criminalized by the people whose positions depend on that disinformation. (That’s folks like Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott.) And I’m not getting sued by some fucking mouthbreather who’s angry I deleted his lie-posts about the 2020 election being “stolen.”
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I can’t blame you for feeling that way. This country is headed down a dangerous path. I’ve been dealing with quite a bit of right-wing extremism taking over the small community I live in recently. And they are using the current GOP playbook used by Trump.
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Look, I’m FOR moderation, as I believe that the health of ANY forum is also dependent on its contents.
Should I post something, which I deem to be inoffensive, but somebody else take offense against it, then I will not be upset if it is deleted.
There’s thousands of other forums out there, and offenders who are unhappy about their posts getting deleted, can jolly well go find some other place to offload their posts and be happy about it.
This forum’s just right as it is, and we most definitely do not want somebody to “rock the boat”…
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I do hope that we can avoid shitty laws, as I am also not in the mood for a fun day in court…
For now, let’s enjoy it while it lasts.
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Lee, it’s a safe bet for planning on the law going back into effect. There’s been a lot decisions made in the last two years under the guise of fixing problems by adding restrictions that can be traced, in my opinion, to making one particular person happy.
I’m still in for helping with costs of running the site on the new host. Hopefully, we can keep what’s currently available.
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Ditto on this.
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Here is the cost breakdown with what I’m doing right now. This isn’t necessarily the best/cheapest/smartest way to host Discord, no warranty is expressed or implied, etc etc.
The forums run on an AWS EC2 t3a.medium instance. The instance size is driven primarily by Discourse’s RAM requirements, since Discourse itself is a Docker application that bundles together a whole bunch of stuff. I am not using a separate RDS host or anything like that—Discourse and all its dependencies, including postgres, run locally on the EC2 instance.
Taking advantage of reserved pricing—i.e., pre-paying for the server for 1- or 3-year terms—means the cost is pretty not-awful. Specifically, a t3a.med instance costs a couple hundred bucks per year, or $380-ish for a three year reservation. The current year reservation is up in November 2022.
AWS hosting is only one option, but it’s the one I’m currently using and the one I’m most familiar with from a perspective of costing. Realistically, Discourse can be hosted pretty much anywhere where you get a Docker-capable VPS with 4GB or more of RAM, and I can chuck a current forum state backup at whomever wants to take over hosting so the entire thing comes across as-is.
(Bandwidth costs are negligible with the current level of traffic—maybe $1-2/month on AWS. Storage costs are $5-ish per month for the server’s two EBS volumes plus 2 weeks of EBS snapshots for backup.)
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