So it’s been five months since @tom@feddit.uk last posted and two months since he contacted @emperor@feddit.uk
It’s seems like nothing much has happened and the plans for a replacement were briefly resurrected then shutdown.
I guess we’ve all moved on.
There’s a couple of vocal people trying to get quackhouse.uk as it’s replacement, but it’s down at the moment. And a crap name, imo.
Seems to be just one guy who thinks quackhouse is a good name but, like you say, he/she is very vocal.
Yeah, the name is silly but as long as it’s a server with several admins and well looked after, I really don’t mind.
From what I understand, Tom helped Emperor rescue Feddit at the last minute way back when. Tom hasn’t been heard or seen from since and seeing as he has sole access to the server upfront, we’re kind of stuck, especially as everyone else upgrades to 0.19.1.
Same. I can live with quackhouse if it’s really the only choice, but I wonder if the last few months has set back UK lemmy for quite a while.
I had thought that Tom had given Emperor all the details and we had >1 admin now?
If Tom’s not interested anymore, then fair enough, but can’t the admins take on the server, it’s name, do upgrades, etc?
I totally understand that it’s all about time and money to do this and I’m just another freeloading user on this instance, but this is a crazy situation to be in.
From what I understand, the new admins only have limited web access to the server. Tom is the only one who can perform any software upgrades etc. So although we’re in a better position than last time, it’s still not good enough.
Quackhouse came about from an agreement in a matrix chat. The chat was free to join and posted on this instance. It was composed of people who wanted a new instance. We didn’t hold such a discussion publicly as to prevent people from domain parking.
We were wanting to distance ourselves from Lemmy (in name only, the devs are very volatile and give it a bad name, plus lemmy being difficult to explain to more casual people who’d appreciate the forum without an overwhelming technical explanation of how it works. Lastly we wanted a unique identity, like how beehaw or shitjustworks have) and Reddit (for obvious reasons)
We wanted a fun recognisable name, we did come up with ideas like “bri-ish” and I think something along the lines of “ukonline”. We tried a pub theme also with “localpub.uk” and “thelemmingandthed.uk” but people opted for the duck theme and “quackhouse” as it sounded fun.
Personally, Quackhouse wasn’t my first choice. But it’s what everyone was happy enough with come the vote, so that’s why I stand by it.
To elaborate more on the unique identity thing, we wanted to have a name we could use to spread in lemmy circles like joinlemmy.org. generally people who already know about Lemmy and want to join wouldn’t really care about “lemmy” being in the name. So we thought it actually could detract more.
However, then we had stage two: word of mouth spreading / promoting. Generally just tell people about the site, the unique name wouldn’t require explaining the fediverse, there was an idea floating about with “Tell them it’s a UK based forum with no trackers or ads and is donation funded”, they’d see the content from federation and by the time they realise what’s happening, they wouldn’t be intimidated by the idea.
Also had a small plan to even post a lemmy client on the play store which by default points to the new instance, name it after it and everything, just for fun :P
We were and are committed to lemmy, would only jump ship from it somehow died or became obsolete (there’s no plans on moving away from Lemmy being the actual software or any Lemmy features)