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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Rummel ago
Any chance Voat could use a blockchain type of deal to keep alive if the worst happens?
I think it's possible to have a website running on a blockchain, but I'm not sure of the semantics.
I would gladly host a node if so. This is the last place on the Internet that doesn't fucking suck. One thing about this idea is voat would not operate on the clear Internet any longer, I believe there are browser plug ins that you need to access .bit domains so it could be as simple as that.
Edit: shameless headline for visibility
@puttitout
djsumdog ago
There are things like IPFS and ZeroNet, but neither are really adapted to the scale of Voat. It'd require a lot of new development. ZeroNet still has several unaddressed security issues and not enough devs.
Distributed private networks at scale are going to look more like FreeNet, which is slow and limited.
TheTrigger ago
Have you used Freenet, lately? I have it a go, on a virtual machine, a few weeks ago. It'd been a while and wanted to see how it was doing. Aside from all the kiddie porn, it was actually pretty fast. Not sure how voat would be able to run on there, though. Not sure if sites can be updated quickly enough to support real-time conversations.
But it's definitely better than nothing. Distributed hosting might just be the only way to go.
poodog ago
It's fast cause of all the FBI nodes hosting kiddie porn and tracking your ass
TheTrigger ago
As long as you're not the one downloading any of it. AFAIK, it's distributed, so you'll likely have a least random portions of that stuff on your cache file. However, it's all super encrypted and you don't even have access to it anyways unless you were specifically looking for that content through the browser itself. So I don't see what you're talking about.
It's fast because a lot of people are using it. The more people use it, the faster it goes. Even on voat, there's random jailbait shit. Like most people, though, you either just don't go to those subs or already have them blocked.
poodog ago
I thought all the jailbait shit got banned super early on
Never seen it on here
suramartian ago
Aside from all the uh... what? That's a pretty fucking major problem...
I would never visit a site where that was even a risk.
TheTrigger ago
I didn't actually go to any of those sites. But they're there, in search engines and link-indexing/categorizing sites. My point is, they probably congregate there for a reason. Obviously you wouldn't let that stuff on voat there, same as we already do here.