There are now 80 people over in the Discord chat. I know live chat isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, so I wanted to sum up some recent grassroots efforts that have largely been happening over there.
What we know:
The issues over at Deadspin have folks wondering if Kinja is going to stick around or whether the Kinja owners are happy with indie blogs talking about Kinja ownership on the Kinja platform. No one has officially made any comments one way or another.
How some people are feeling:
This is an awesome community. When people started to feel threatened, folks came together to start brainstorming ideas about how to keep it together. That’s really freaking cool.
My own editorial here is that the days of Kinja-for-all probably has an expiration date that’s sooner than we’d all like. Now is good time to start building a life raft (or an ark) in order to keep the good times going. That’s not particularly easy, but it’s possible. The people I’ve talked to have been amazing and have not just offered ideas on how to save Oppo, but how to make it better (ideas for podcasts, expanding the live chat in Discord, social features in a future iteration, etc). That makes me excited and happy to help in any way that I can.
What’s being done:
Brian, the person who holds uber-admin for Oppo on Kinja, has secured the perfect domain name to move to if we need it.
The Discord chat has been amazing. In depth chats into oversquare vs undersquare, Brexit, space technology, and classic shitposting has been the name of the game outside of “what if” about Kinja. Link is at the bottom to join if you haven’t already.
The elephant in the room is “okay, so what if Kinja went away tomorrow?”. That’s something I’m personally very interested in. Wordpress seems like it might be a good answer so I’ve started putting together a Wordpress plugin that approximates some of the features that help make this community work (like notifications for comments/saves, user icons, the ability to be granted posting privileges, etc). There’s also the possibility to take the Oppo community to new levels (embedded Discord chat, private messages, etc) but I’m interested in base functionality first. The whole idea is to have a ready-to-eat Kinja-style experience in a Wordpress plugin.
Not to mention a commenting system that has the potential to be worlds better than the one here.
When (or better yet, if) a switch-over occurs will need to be a community decision (again, I suggest joining the Discord chat) or (equally likely) driven by Kinja no longer being an option.
More fun from Discord:
Rallydarkstrike has put together a new Oppo user map. It would be great if you could add yourself to it. There have also been rumblings of perhaps doing more Oppomeetups - which is much more likely if we know what region you’re in.
Closing
I would recommend we keep as much strife about Kinja’s owners off the Oppo site as we can. No sense rattling the hornet’s nest if we don’t have to. It will take me some time to finish the plugin (PHP isn’t necessarily my forte as a marketing person) and if we have to suddenly move, it would be great to have that ready rather than half-ass it.
We have an awesome community here. I’ve met people through here (yes, in person) that I consider friends and hope that continues. I’ll repost this in the morning Pacific Time for additional eyeballs.