Edit:
I'm simply blown away with you goats. I was expecting a somber farewell in this thread but instead you've done the exact opposite; pulled off a rally at the bottom of the 9th. On a personal note, and this may seem sentimental, but you have given me a new hope for Voat at very dark time for me.
All I can say now is: Let's do this! I think your message is clear. We have a ton of work to do, a short window in which to do it, and I fully understand I can't do it alone. We will need all hands on deck if Voat is to have any chance at survival.
I will post the plans I have for Voat as well as a status update on your contributions by Monday.
P.S. Old goats, be nice to the new kids. ;)
Original Post
As I sit here about to write one of the most difficult announcements yet, I was just reminded that my account is one month shy of three years old. Nearly three years ago I came here from Reddit when the vote counts disappeared and I felt I could no longer trust what I saw. Nearly three years ago I met @Atko and started contributing code because I believed in him, his mission, and what he was doing. So much has happened during these last three years.
I know a lot of you are new, but Voat has been through a wild ride, and never at any point was it an easy one. My memories are bittersweet when it comes to Voat. I’ve sacrificed the best years of my life for Voat, I’ve lost my business partner whom I miss a lot, I’ve lost people in my life, I’ve given up golf which was my passion, and even with all this I still believe in Voat. I still see the dire need for Free Speech in this world, I fear a world without it, and I still will do anything I can to continue providing it.
But alas, I am powerless to keep Voat running without financial support. As of right now Voat has no solid commitments. Voat has always needed a financial partner whom had balls of steel and backing deep enough to give Voat the capabilities to run as an actual business (being able to hire staff and set itself apart from its competitors), not just a one man show. Potential investors have one or the other of these traits, but we have yet to find one with both. In this day and age, this is Voat’s unicorn.
In the past Voat has been lucky enough to be part of special programs designed for startup companies which gave us free licensing on various products and significantly reduced hosting costs. These programs have since expired and we are now paying full costs. Last month was our first non-discounted month on Azure and the usage was $6,600.90 USD. Donations, ads, and merchandise only put a dent in this and this is the primary reason why we have not launched another merchandise run. And begging for donations was always something we hated doing.
I’m writing this announcement to prepare this community, and the Voat family, for the possibility of a closure. I’m not certain on timing and I have too much invested in this place to give up just yet, so I cannot provide any timelines. In the meantime, I will soon be scaling back all Voat’s servers by at least 50%. I will also turn off some features that are resource intensive.
Voat needs funding. Without it, Voat will be no more.
Voat needs an Angel
Canary
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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neogag ago
What kind of product licensing? Please tell me you aren't paying for Microsoft SQL Server. Replace all those licensed products with open source equivalents.
Maybe silly suggestion, as I haven't seen your codebase: benchmark and optimize so you can use cheaper hardware to host this thing.
djsumdog ago
It's all written in C# and runs on .NET:
https://github.com/voat/voat
I was surprised when I first saw it years ago. Voat could save quite a bit on licensing by moving to .NET Core Docker containers. Microsoft has an office SQL Server Docker container as well (although I'm not sure if you can get production licensing for it; I just use it for integration testing).
Zorton ago
Is Mono an option these days, seems like the M$ tax could be destroyed that way.....
PuttItOut ago
The code has just recently gotten to a place where we can optimize it. It is on our list but we need staff, it's simply too much for me to continue doing alone. So, if funding does happen, this will be one of the first things done.
We have been working our data access code to be able to port to pg, but to answer your question, sql is not a significant cost for us right now. This will not always be the case.
0011011000111001 ago
There are a lot of really smart people on Voat. Would you be willing to allow help the community? Make a post asking for coders/developers to optimize the code?
SeptemberVirgin ago
I've yet to find them.
RiverWind ago
This is a great suggestion.
Enough people have seen Voat in action now for users to have great ideas for Voat 2.0. Also, there are likely to be sufficiently technical people here to know how best to implement such suggestions.
I think the thing to do would be to recruit brains from the right places. Define the skeleton around which discussion could take place. Characterise the types of topics that need attention and set some goals accordingly.
go1dfish ago
What is? bandwidth? CPU?
sakuramboo ago
Bandwidth is always the killer. Storage is always pretty cheap, especially on AWS.
neogag ago
The site is all text which compresses well with gzip, so I wonder if it really is bandwidth that's the issue. He mentioned licenses, I'm dying to find out what product licenses!
sakuramboo ago
Text doesn't get compressed when transmitted, though. And, with the added SSL layer, that's even more.
Bandwidth is always the cost killer of any site, unless you are a specialized company dealing in big data or data processing, etc. You pay for every bit that goes in and out of your network. So, that asshole who hits F5 for 2 hours because you called him a lame-ass, unless your site has a free caching service, you are paying for that.
Yes, licensing costs are also a huge factor, but not as bad as it was 15 years ago. However, I do agree that porting everything to Linux/PHP/Postgres would be a pretty big cost savings, too (though, not as much as one would think. Azure/AWS is still pretty cheap).
heebykikeburger ago
Could a restful/dumb backend with something like React on the client save a shitload of bandwidth?
neogag ago
I'm launching a service soon and that's what we're doing. There is no need for complex abstractions on the server side (MVC); Microsoft platforms encourage that, but it's a huge hindrance and reduces productivity.
If you go with REST, you can go stateless (JWT) and not maintain session on the server at all. This lets you scale horizontally very easily.
heebykikeburger ago
Nice very modern.
neogag ago
Gzip does compress the request/response payload before transmission and it gets decompressed when it reaches its destination (browser/server), so it does reduce bandwidth usage, very significantly on a pure text site like this.
This page, for example, gets reduced by a whopping 85% thanks to gzip. https://checkgzipcompression.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvoat.co%2Fv%2Fannouncements%2F1866053%2F9138900
neogag ago
Again, maybe a silly suggestion: you could also go for auto-scaling hosting. AWS has that, it's not too hard to setup and will scale down hardware automatically depending on the amount of traffic you get
Use Async everywhere to serve more requests while IO operations are happening
What kind of staff/contributors are needed? Maybe we could get people from v/programming to help out. My spare time is very fragmented, is there a way to contribute for someone who has numerous small irregular blocks of time?
edit: Also ditch Comodo SSL certificate, Let's Encrypt is free and easy as hell to set up!
edit2:
Double cache duration on up/downvoats
Enable HTTP2, it multiplexes frequent requests using a persistent connection
RiverWind ago
AWS could be a stop-gap. If desperate, they have an options where you can choose processing as it becomes available, but not on a guaranteed basis.