lines will now be community funded!
i’ve always thought of this forum as belonging to the community, those who gather here and discuss similar interests. the voice of lines is that of many, of us together. we.
by most measures this has always been true. volunteer moderators have helped navigate situations and maintained day-to-day operations. the code of conduct was constructed years ago as a community effort.
there is one final element however which could be perceived as contrary: monome (the company) has always funded the server costs, despite community donation offers. we (me speaking as monome) had felt we should simply cover these costs since the forum originated as infrastructure for discussion of our open-source devices. in recent years we’ve been reducing our commercial activity here by eliminating release announcement and shipping updates. and while sharing and discussion of creative uses of monome devices still feels aligned with the spirit of this space, our support focus has moved to direct email. our decision to do this came from the need to adhere to the forum’s non-commercial guidelines— guidelines which have kept this forum free from spam, viral marketing, and general exploitation. we (the forum moderators) believe that these guidelines (and the effort that goes into enforcing them) is what keeps this place great.
and so, lines will no longer be company sponsored (however benevolent the company may be).
lines is now maintained* by the community itself!
moving forward
llllllll.co@protonmail.com is our new community email address, maintained by the moderators: @dan_derks @ioflow @emenel @disquiet @glia @papernoise @Galapagoose
we’ve created a paypal account with this same address. @alanza has volunteered to be the treasurer and manage this account.
we’ll run a quarterly fundraiser and provide a complete report of expenses and funds raised.
our first round is live: donate here
the lines server is hosted by digital ocean. our current monthly expense is $68. (this cost was greatly reduced with a huge amount of effort to migrate the email system which brought the monthly expense to well over $100). if you’re considering using digital ocean, this referral link will give $20 to the lines server.
server administration will continue being done by @ioflow and myself
pending discussions
the moderators continue to discuss some subtleties of the non-commercial guidelines. while we certainly need to disallow viral marketing, we don’t want to strictly prohibit small scale projects that might have some amount of commercial future, seeing how many of us here have crossed this threshold at some point.
the Monome category’s future is also under discussion as we consider the possible archival of old topics and categorization of future monome topics.
changes for 2023
a couple days ago we refined some categories.
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General has been established, which merges Process and Tech along with a healthy scattering of Open threads.
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Open is renamed Off Topic
we feel this reaffirms the central theme of music, art, and technology and reduces confusion about where to post, given the blurry boundaries between these topics.
we (the moderators, to be clear) are also eliminating the Trade category. we know that a subset of the community will be frustrated by this and the decision has been considered very seriously. the trade category and activity surrounding it has remained the most substantial moderation burden over the years. it has been the primary source of intervention, mediation, and banning. we understand that trade is for some a fundamental component of the art practice discussed here— but managing a marketplace which continues to grow is not our primary goal— in fact, we’ve come to acknowledge that it detracts from the ability of the community to maintain cohesion.
we feel that these changes together will provide a foundation for the community to continue on well into the future. thank you all for your support and participation— this space has been constantly surprising and inspiring. let’s see what happens next.
ps. if you’re like more context about the decision around Trade, check out this post below
pps. if you want more context about discussions around monome going forward, see this post
*this wording “maintained” was changed jan 4 5:46pm est from “owned” to clarify
