botsin.space postmortem

I switched botsin.space to read-only mode on December 16th. I essentially just prevented the creation of new toots -- you can still login, migrate your account, request an account archive, etc. Unsurprisingly, the load on the website has plummeted. In the next couple of weeks I hope to spend some time downsizing the instance, cleaning up some junk, etc, etc, to have a lean archive of the server that I can keep online without much expense for as long as possible.

After I made the announcement that I was shutting down the instance, a few things happened. First, I received an overwhelming amount of thanks and support. I'm so incredibly grateful for all the kind words. So many people reached out to offer their thanks for running botsin.space, and their understanding for my need to end things. A few people (literally just one or two out of hundreds) were angry about it, which I understand.

Several people/organizations reached out with offers to either fund the service, offer spare servers/bandwidth, promote their new cloud platform, or take it over in one way or another. I rejected these for several reasons. First, several of them involved me continuing to run botsin.space, and as soon as I made the announcement that I wanted to shut down the instance, I realized just how badly I didn't want to do that anymore. Second, a few of the offers involved established orgs/people with a decent presence on the fediverse, but I was concerned that handing over control would change how botsin.space would be run in ways that made me uncomfortable. For example, I blocked Threads/Meta on botsin.space, and I know that some of the orgs that offered their support are either cool with Meta or even supported by Meta. That's their right for sure, but it's not something I was comfortable with.

Leave a Comment