Hi everyone! Mike here. I usually write Chinwag announcements in the third person, because I don’t know why. It was a thing I started, and I liked separating the housekeeping from my personal posts and updates.
This time will be different! This isn’t a catastrophic post or bad news or anything like that – let’s just establish that right now. It’s a bit of a big statement of intent though, so let’s rip into that.
I’ve carried Chinwag as far as I can.
We’ll leave that hanging for a second while I talk about what the hell Chinwag even is.
What the hell is Chinwag anyway, Mike?
In 2015, I registered the domain chinwag.im, and wrote a tutorial for setting up an XMPP messaging service using it as an example. It worked, and that service is still running. In 2017 I got interested in this “Mastodon” thing I’d been hearing about and started an instance for that. I registered chinwag.org when that suddenly became available, and Chinwag Social has been up ever since. It’s now the oldest, still-operating Mastodon instance in Australia.
In 2022, in response to a rise in demand and a lack of other Australian servers, we ran up The Blower as well, which is a bit more of a “standard” Mastodon experience. That’s kicking along happily too! Then there’s Deffo, and the Forgejo server, and … you get the idea. There’s a lot going on here.
That stuff costs money.
Oh, so that’s where you’re going with this?
Kind of. I mean, I looked at the numbers and this is becoming a very expensive hobby. And it is a hobby – nobody asked for this, I just did it because I was interested in stuff and people seemed to use it, and I’ve met cool people and it’s awesome!
I can’t keep doing this though. It’s getting a bit crazy. Hence the title of this post!
It’s up to you!
I’ve put up a new Support Our Work page here on the chinwag.au site that’s now going to be the overview of everything Chinwag does. During the next few months, the services we run will expand or contract to meet the available financial resources. I won’t shut anything down that anyone’s using, but things may have to move from dedicated, professional hosting to an old server in my back room or something. Our uptime may not be what it was. Stuff like that!
So yeah, follow me on Chinwag for updates, although I’d be pretty shocked if you are reading this and aren’t already.
Let’s see what happens!
One response to “Go Hard or Go Home”
@jpm @matt there's also ⬆️
This is a bit shaky and wonky though, I don't think the WordPress stuff picks up edits yet, and I use headings a lot that won't translate well into most fedi clients.
You can definitely follow @announce and see what happens though!