Comment by Christopher Hatton on 1st mo. 4, 2023 at 11:41pm

Hi Martin, I’m a very occasional user, but Supportive of what you are trying to do here. I’ve just set up a small monthly donation to help you modernise this.

As I’m not a regular user (and never will be) I’m not sure of what other capabilities I’d like to see/would make me use it more.

A calendar option might be helpful to advertise specific Quaker events but from experience these could be easily be hijacked/spammed /may require some form of “moderation”. Also a calendar shouldn’t really be duplicating for instance a FWCC/YM Site calendar.

All the best

Christopher

Comment by Olaf Radicke on 1st mo. 7, 2023 at 7:56am

Hi Martin!

Is there a technical concept?

Olaf

Comment by David Holdsworth on 1st mo. 7, 2023 at 7:37pm

I guess Facebook groups is a cheap route. Most people are on Facebook these days. Although some people may not like Facebook. Blogger allows multiple blog authors to, but not sure how many per blog. Also again Google is not everyone's cup of tea. Do you have any ideas yourself as to how you would like it to look? Perhaps people could advise better once they know what features should remain or be added? I love QuakerQuaker and definitely think it should continue to exist.

Comment by QuakerQuaker on 1st mo. 8, 2023 at 4:23pm

Christopher: Thanks for the ongoing support! It’s very helpful. Calendars on the current site were never well used and may be something better handled by more formal Quaker orgs. 

Olaf, I can answer you more in the Mastodon discussion. I’m thinking more about what I’d like to see rather than the backend at this point. The original QQ vision from 2005 was to share links to outstanding online commentaries and a discussion platform, all to support what came to be known as the Convergent Friends vision. It was a good way to publicize blogs that were not getting much widespread attention. I think there’s still a need for that, though discussions happen on many more platforms today.

David, the last thing I want to do is turn it over to another proprietary platform. Facebook Geoups are very public but the tone of them is often set by Facebook’s algorithms and I think there’s a role for Quaker discussions hosted on Quaker spaces. if feels like the growing  distrust of Facebook and Twitter and the widespread adoption of Mastodon and other Fediverse services might give us fresh tools—open source, public, with more integration possibilities than we’d get on any of the big tech closed platforms. 

Comment by David Holdsworth on 1st mo. 8, 2023 at 6:27pm

Thank you for your response. I see what you mean. Yes even though they are big Facebook and Twitter are losing ground and I agree about what you say about algorithms. There definitely needs to be space out there for Quaker discussions and spaces.

Comment by Christopher Hatton on 1st day (Sun)

Hi Martin,  

I hope other users have been making occasional/regular donations.  I am going to have to freeze a lot of my spending for the rest of the year.  Last donation in June, and then I'll start again in January 2024. 

Comment by Martin Kelley on 2nd day (Mon)

Hi Christopher, thanks for your ongoing support all this time; I understand needing to slow down sometimes. The monthly donations have become pretty sparse as of late, mostly just covering current costs.

At some point I'll probably pay for some upgrades myself and then work to have an archive of the Ning. For my day job, I was recently proofing an article on Quakers and the afterlife and saw we were linking to a 2012 post on QuakerQuaker! I sometimes forget how many great stories and posts are here in the archives and want to make sure they're still accessible after the move, hopefully even in a way that will maintain links.

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