Soylent News Incorporates
Good news from our friends over at Soylent News! They have finished their incorporation as a Public Benefit Corporation under the "SoylentNews PBC" name. While this structure is not a full 501(c) Non-Profit Organization, it does convey the founding idea of "we aren't just another company out to maximize profits and screw our users" while also being significantly easier to setup (no tax exemption issues to deal with.)
Pipedot and Soylent News both launched at nearly at the same time in reaction to Slashdot's obnoxious disregard of its user base. While each site has its own strengths, they both fill nearly the exact same roll as an alternative to Slashdot. Because I don't want to split our already rather small community and duplicate the same effort, I'd suggest everyone reading Pipedot to look at Soylent News for daily news and discussion.
This does not mean that I'm abandoning Pipedot or stopping the development of the code rewrite project - I'm just giving notice to Pipedot readers that I'm focusing my efforts on development and not on posting a dozen news articles every day / excessively advertising for new users / recruiting new staff / etc... Of course, if you do want to help out, or submit a news article, or help spread the word - by all means, please do!
Pipecode continues to add features and functionality and will continue to progress for the foreseeable future. For example: users can now upload images, share news links, micro-blog their status and other nifty things well beyond what Slashdot ever offered. Our wonderful editor (zafiro17) has volunteered his own website as a guinea pig for the upcoming syndication support. Soon, articles and comments will no longer be tied to a single host and flow in a larger "network" of servers.
Pipedot and Soylent News both launched at nearly at the same time in reaction to Slashdot's obnoxious disregard of its user base. While each site has its own strengths, they both fill nearly the exact same roll as an alternative to Slashdot. Because I don't want to split our already rather small community and duplicate the same effort, I'd suggest everyone reading Pipedot to look at Soylent News for daily news and discussion.
This does not mean that I'm abandoning Pipedot or stopping the development of the code rewrite project - I'm just giving notice to Pipedot readers that I'm focusing my efforts on development and not on posting a dozen news articles every day / excessively advertising for new users / recruiting new staff / etc... Of course, if you do want to help out, or submit a news article, or help spread the word - by all means, please do!
Pipecode continues to add features and functionality and will continue to progress for the foreseeable future. For example: users can now upload images, share news links, micro-blog their status and other nifty things well beyond what Slashdot ever offered. Our wonderful editor (zafiro17) has volunteered his own website as a guinea pig for the upcoming syndication support. Soon, articles and comments will no longer be tied to a single host and flow in a larger "network" of servers.
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 :-).