Roll our own?

[recently_folded]

Again, this topic was raised in greywash's master thread and its comments, with some preliminary thoughts. Clearly, creating a whole new site would be a major undertaking, but so was AO3 and they're kind of the role model now. Can we do this? What do we need to do this? Who's interested in kicking this idea around?

Comments

[satsuma]

I think, at this point we’ve figured out that fandom HAS to own its own servers, so we’re either modifying an existing open source site (such as dreamwidth, mastodon, diaspora, ao3’s code etc) or we’re building our own from scratch. And the level of modification we’ll need to make it work how we want it to means we’ll probably end up having to write 90% of the code either way.

So the tradeoff, i guess, is between adapting something and therefore having things running sooner, but then having to pay back all the technical debt from having to hack everything onto a system that wasn’t built for us, or doing everything from scratch and having it go a lot slower to start (and therefore risk losing momentum/visibility etc, as people are looking for somewhere they can move NOW) but possibly run smoother long term