Story

So, NCommander here from SN. I've always considered Pipedot and SN to be sister sites, with Pipedot going live a few days before we managed to get /code running fully, and much closer in spirit to the original Slashdot than we are, since Slashdot essentially stated as one guy writing his own CMS, and posting articles submitted by the community that he found interesting. If memory serves, Pipedot's genesis actually predates the "Fuck beta" protest since I vaguely remember comments on the Beta journal about forking off from Slashdot, and the very beginning of was basically the original Pipedot logo plus "Index goes here" and some test content" when I first checked out pipedot.org

For those who weren't with us at the beginning, the "Fuck Beta" protest essentially caused users to go in four directions, SoylentNews, pipedot, technocrat (which appears to be dead), and the comp.misc newsgroup. Of these four, SN is the largest, likely since we were able to harness the existing legacy slashcode codebase and managed to launch with a (mostly) feature complete site. This is not to knock bryan, I'm *hugely* impressed on what he accomplished as an essentially a one man team; writing something as complex as a /code replacement should not be understated; to put this in context, the protest was a week long boycott of slashdot and building anything as complex in such a short period of time is extremely difficult.

The fact is, in a broad sense, SN is going down the road different to Pipedot. We've got a mission, and we're doing our best to fulfill it one step at a time; we're not Slashdot, and we're not Pipedot, while we have common origins, and common ground, we both intend to make sure we listen to our community, and not become what /. became. Bryan's comment on SN about how he felt about adversing was enough to make me write a *large* section about it because I see Pipedot as the model of what Slashdot was at its best. I even read much of the bitching of SN here! (and yes, we've fixed some issues from said bitching).

The fact is our end goals are diferent, pipedot intends to be a better slashdot, SoylentNews intends to be a source of journalism, and we're slowly (and in some cases, http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/07/06/1553235, unexpectly) getting there. If we ever manage to get an API for our database coded, I don't think the staff (or I) would have any issue if you spooled in our articles directly (obviously, we have to get a license on new content hammered out before you could do that, but that's on our TODO).

I'll be very sad if Pipedot closes up shop, as it is the closest of the Slashdot spinoffs to the original. Pipecode makes it possible for mere mortals to run a slashcode-like site without making the necessary blood sacarifices required to get /code going, and I hope you the best success on continuing your dev project and keeping your community engaged and involved. Keep fighting the good fight, and I'll be rooting for success all the way :-).