Putting Services on Hiatus

#announcement #update

When I launched folk.zone, I knew the pitch was ambitious: a whole commons of free, federated services run on home hardware by one person. I planned to have Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, BookWyrm, Forgejo, a radio station. I believed that if I built it, people would come.

Several months in, the honest answer is: mostly, they didn't.

What's going on hiatus

Effective today, the following services are offline:

Why?

Resource reality. I had issues with OOM-killing containers and my machine periodically locking up entirely. There's also been a lack of interest, and redunancy. There are many others who are providing similar services, and I don't think there's a need for me to reinvent the wheel.

What this is not

This is not the end of folk.zone!

Recommended Alternatives

Here are better homes:

And for the "one operator, many small services" spirit that folk.zone was going for, these folks do it better:

What I learned

I still believe everything I wrote on the about page. The IndieWeb needs people contributing infrastructure, not just conversation. But infrastructure nobody uses isn't infrastructure.

—Brennan