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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#261

Post by rjmunro »

diggan wrote: post #144
pjc50 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. It will usually be cheaper to serve a terabyte from Cloudflare than to do it yourself: you could probably run the wiki on the free plan!

> Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. If you want to pay for bandwidth then yeah, CloudFlare is a great option. Otherwise, if you like the experience of not paying per GB/TB, go for a dedicated server with unmetered connection that has the same price every month, regardless.

Cloudflare don't charge per GB/TB. You get unlimited bandwidth even on their free plan. The problem with paying per GB is that it's in the CDN's interest for you to get a DDOS attack so they can charge you for all the bandwidth. It's in Cloudflare's interest to reduce DDOS attacks and unwanted bot traffic because it costs them bandwidth, not you.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#262

Post by adw »

diggan wrote: post #173
cookmeplox wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already turning a profit! And there are no third-party investors (or debt) – it's all controlled by wiki people[1] [1] https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited

Aw, I take that as it is in fact a for-profit company already. Regardless, I wish you luck for the future! May you not go down the almost inevitable enshittification hole.

It’s a company limited by guarantee, which is the structure you use in the UK for non-charity non-profits.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#263

Post by ChadNauseam »

robotnikman wrote: post #233
diggan wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aw, I take that as it is in fact a for-profit company already. Regardless, I wish you luck for the future! May you not go down the almost inevitable enshittification hole.

At least it is a private company though, meaning they are are required to make constant year over year gains for shareholders and investors. They have much more control over where the company goes and how it operates.

publicly traded companies are not "required" to make constant year over year gains for shareholders and investors, that is just what the owners usually decide to tell the company to do. The owners of a privately traded company could decide to, and the owners of a publicly traded company could decide not to. For example, zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes and if other shareholders don't like it they can kick rocks. This is pretty much the same situation that people imagine is the case with privately traded companies, even though facebook is obviously publicly traded.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#264

Post by starkparker »

giantrobot wrote: post #252
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #69

MediaWiki is actually pretty easy to set up on a web server, speaking as someone who's now done it twice. You plop the files into htdocs, make sure PHP is set up, set up vanity URLs if you want to , and then… well, that's it. The final step is to go to the site, fill in the setup form, download the settings file it gives you and upload it. It doesn't even need an external database, it can use SQLite; if email setup i…

Making MediaWiki survive non-trivial amounts of traffic is much harder than simply setting it up. It's not an impossible task for sure but there's no one click performance setting.

Specifically, managing edge and object caches (and caching for anonymous viewers vs. logged-in editors with separate frontend and backend caches) while mitigating the effects of cache misses, minimizing the impacts of the job queue when many pages are changed at once, optimizing image storage, thumbnailing, and caching, figuring out when to use a wikitext template vs. a Scribunto/Lua module vs. a MediaWiki extension in PHP (and if Scribunto, which Lua runtime to use), figuring out which structured data backend to use and how to tune it, figuring out whether to rely on API bots (expensive on the backend) vs. cache scrapers (expensive on the frontend) vs. database dump bots (no cost to the live site but already outdated before they're finished dumping) for automated content maintenance jobs, tuning rate limiting, and loadbalancing it all.

At especially large scales, spinning the API and job queues off altogether into microservices and insulating the live site from the performance impact of logging this whole rat's nest.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#265

Post by sph »

marxisttemp wrote: post #242
mardifoufs wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're talking about the other wikipedia founder, no? Jimbo might have some libertarian tendencies too but they haven't been super visible in the way he directed the wiki. But yeah, his involvement with wikia is a huge stain

Nope, I am talking about Jimbo. From that website he founded: > Wales has previously referred to himself as an Objectivist, referring to the philosophy of writer Ayn Rand in the mid-20th century that emphasizes reason, individualism, and capitalism.

What has objectivism got to do with anarchism? I take offence at being put in the same pile as Rand fanatics.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#266

Post by mossTechnician »

robotnikman wrote: post #233
diggan wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aw, I take that as it is in fact a for-profit company already. Regardless, I wish you luck for the future! May you not go down the almost inevitable enshittification hole.

At least it is a private company though, meaning they are are required to make constant year over year gains for shareholders and investors. They have much more control over where the company goes and how it operates.

Shouldn't it be worrying that companies are required to make consistent gains* for shareholders and investors? At some point, a company will naturally reach a market saturation point.

* ETA: I meant "growth" here, not profit

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#267

Post by hiatus »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #189
cookmeplox wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already turning a profit! And there are no third-party investors (or debt) – it's all controlled by wiki people[1] [1] https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited

How is it making money?

It is described in the linked article.

> The company primarily relies on three streams of revenue: user donations, serving ads on select Weird Gloop wikis, and a contract with Jagex that includes a fee to cover hosting and administration costs.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#268

Post by starkparker »

EcommerceFlow wrote: post #12

Google giving Fandom powerful rankings bothers me too, since their intrusive ads clearly go against Google ranking factors. Still, I'm glad for some competition. However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?

> However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?

Yes, per this post:

> I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host.

...

> If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come say hi[1]

1: https://weirdgloop.org/contact

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#269

Post by [deleted] »

burkaman wrote: post #25

If you're wondering what happened to Fandom, just look at who runs it now. > In February 2018, former AOL CEO Jon Miller, backed by private equity firm TPG Capital, acquired Fandom. > In February 2019, former StubHub CEO Perkins Miller took over as CEO - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) It's hard to imagine a worse leadership team than private equity + StubHub.

[deleted]

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#270

Post by [deleted] »

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #11
tombert wrote: post #6

Fandom is one of my least favorite things now. The site ends up having more ads than the average porn or piracy website, it manages to slow down my relatively beefy laptops without even trying. I love the idea of fan wikis, but Fandom is basically the worst possible implementation of that idea.

The "fan" in "Fandom" means the fan in your computer.

[deleted]
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