Gotta love the use of quotes here:

it should be treated with “utmost importance.”

In other words, ignore this message from our lawyers.

The thing about this is that it’s often unexpected. AOL was on nobody’s radar. Threads was coming for a while. What you don’t know is what might happen if someone on Threads links to this community here and a post goes viral on Threads via a link to say Instagram, or Facebook, or both. What would happen here?

Really, I’m asking the question so people spend some time considering how important this community is to them and what might be required to work in new environments.

I don’t know how you have implemented this, but on AWS we tend to set up an automatic snapshot every x-hours that expires (gets deleted) after y-days. If worse comes to happen, you resurrect the latest snapshot and you’re up and running. This isn’t a high stakes environment, so small levels of data loss might be acceptable to the community.

I’d be happy to look at and assist with your GitHub repository. Note that I am unable to make a specific time commitment at this point.

I did consider making the “business” aspect explicit in my list, but shied away from it, since with that comes “commercialism” and many mistake that within the context of Amateur Radio. For example, I’ve been told by “experts” that my podcast is a commercial enterprise and should be banned from local repeaters because I make an eBook available of the transcripts and in the past I had a “Donate” button on my website - no longer, thanks to the shenanigans by PayPal.

There is nothing wrong with “failure”. It’s a state, just like “on” or “off”. If it doesn’t do what you want, then you might call that state “failure”, but if it did exactly what you planned, then that might be called “success”, even if from the outside looking in, the two are identical, the instance is no longer responding. In other words, this is a matter of perspective and planning. Which is why we’re having this conversation in the first place :-)

I understand your point. I’m not sure that you understood mine.

Let’s say that we do as you say. To issue the signature, the Government would need to verify your identity, which as you point out, they already can. Here’s the kicker. After verification, the signature is now linked to those same details in their systems. This makes them a massive target. One that they are ill-equiped to deal with.

That’s why I am not a fan of this idea.

Ultimately this is about risk mitigation, about what happens if. There are many different ways to tackle this. I have not found a guaranteed solution, but here are some to consider:

• If we keep the community size small, in other words, restrict the number of people who can join, the impact of this instance going away is limited in scope. It’s not a fun thing to contemplate, but it’s potentially a viable and effective solution.
• If we “appoint” moderators, there are implications of trust. Even the most trustworthy person you know might make a decision that’s not what you would have chosen. Furthermore, people make mistakes for many different reasons. Making rules around moderation is attractive, but edge-cases will always exist and “don’t be a dick” means different things to different people.
• The same is true for “appointing” an administrator, for the plumbing of the IT infrastructure, not the content. I have been spending a little time trying to either find or construct a “turn-key” fediverse “node” that can be instigated and run almost autonomously. This would reduce the requirements for human resources, but it would cost money.
• Creating a “body”, a formal agreement between “founders”, is another way to go. It does not guarantee that your efforts will be a success. Even if you write your constitution to deal with malicious intent mitigation there’s always someone who will take over and shit in the nest.
• We could leave well enough alone and let it crash when it does, either as a service, or as a community, as-in, it gets overtaken by unwanted content. We could stem the flow for a while, but if that’s ultimately unsuccessful, we could just shut it down.
• One point worth making separately is the legal aspect of this community. What happens if a member posts, willingly or not, illegal material? What happens if someone attempts to invoke the GDPR on some aspect of the ongoings here? How is that “risk” mitigated?

Note that I’m not advocating one solution over another. This is more an attempt at identifying ways to mitigate any potential “risk” in whatever shape that arrives.

I’ll also note that the amateur radio on-air experience is essentially ephemeral in nature. There is nothing wrong with treating this community in the same way. It has a nice symmetry to it if anything.

You might also expand that consideration to the infrastructure this instance runs on.

Thank you for your considered response. It was illuminating and helpful to provide context about our little community here.

It does raise a different question about our community.

I realise that this is an uncomfortable question, but right now there’s 267 people who are part of a “club” (for want of a better word) with one benevolent leader, you , who controls everything here, for better or worse.

What happens if you are unavailable for any period of time?

Yeah, good luck with that. In Australia they stopped paying and now the media organisations that relied on this income are pretty much stuffed.

I’ve just added some context above.

I’ve just added some context above.