Chinwag Tomorrow

Mike here! How’s it going? You good?

I usually write Chinwag “official” posts in a bit of an abstracted and formal third-person form, but this time we’re going to pull up a chair in front of a fire and have a little chat instead. See, I kind of let it drift by without comment at the time, but Chinwag, as a project, is ten years old as of last month.

The reason that milestone got to go silently past is that Chinwag today is really not the same thing as Chinwag then. Initially it was a domain I picked up on a whim to use as an example deployment as part of a tutorial series on running an XMPP messaging service. Today, the anniversary I really keep track of is the start of Chinwag Social becoming part of the fediverse – that’ll be eight years as of this December.

So I didn’t think it worth making a big deal at the time, but it’s certainly led me to doing a lot of thinking along the lines of “Well, if Chinwag isn’t what it once was, what will it be next? What the hell is it now?” and so forth.

I’ve used taglines like “communication for humans” and “find your flock” to fill in blank spaces in templates for a while now, and it’s kind of my vibe, but fundamentally Chinwag is a selection of services that I need to exist, personally, and it doesn’t add much work to open them up to others that need them as well. One thing I need is social and messaging services that don’t elevate my anxiety and demand space in my brain with incessant notifications. Simple, right? By deploying my own sites for this, I’ve got a degree of control that’s impossible without it.

I’ve got the skills for this, which is great. I know not many others do, so you’re welcome to piggyback on my stuff if you value the same things, for sure.

I guess my main thing is not exerting pressure to engage. I don’t notify anyone if there’s nothing to say, I won’t manufacture engagement, I won’t put users in a Skinner Box and sell access to advertisers. I just won’t, because that bullshit fries my brain big time and I’m so much better since I cut those other big sites out of my life.

I also won’t email you if we haven’t seen you log in for a while, and I won’t threaten to purge accounts if they don’t meet some activity threshold. If you only have something to say once every five years, your accounts will be here, as you left them, until you decide to delete anything.

Of course, all this means I’m terrible at marketing and user retention.

What’s next then?

More of the same? I don’t know, but that’s why I’m writing this, to explore some ideas and float possibilities for feedback. Things will likely potter along as they are for quite some time, there’s no reason to do otherwise. However, it is an investment in time and money and both always seem to have a lot of other demands on them besides all this technology stuff.

I wish Chinwag was my job. I wish I could give it the attention that it deserves and that I want to give it, but it’s hard. If there’s a way to leap forward to a point between here and some kind of larger scale thing I’d jump in a heartbeat, but I can’t do the work required for that and the work required to avoid being crushed to death by the boots of capitalism.

There’s also a big blob of uncertainty around mandatory age verification that’s looming over us all, given the complete lack of any details or specifics around what’s required, and required from whom. Free, independent services in other countries have shut down over this kind of stuff, but I would like to say that despite making light of age verification in the past, I am going to fight like hell to do whatever’s needed to stay in the game.

I’m also going to add a couple more services, tentatively, in the near future. Things I need, personally, but that may also be helpful to others. It’s a model that’s worked out so far, in terms of not being an undue mental burden to maintain while working full-time in a day job.

I’d like to hear from you as well, the Chinwag user or potential user. What’s missing from your life that maybe I can help with? I’m considering outright offering paid services for people but this comes with support needs and service levels that may be hard to meet alone, if I’m not on it full time, so it’s hard to find good fits.

If you think me, Mike, is a person who should be working more on this then you can always support Chinwag financially like many fine people already do! At the moment we run at a bit of a loss, but if that ever tipped to a point where it wasn’t I’d be picking up pace quite a bit.

Over to you, folks. I’m going to go finally merge in that Mastodon update from a few weeks back and make sure our house is in order to incorporate 4.4.0 when it releases.