I don't know the current total number of daily active users and rants counts on devRant. But maybe it would be nice to have a group tagged/mentioned feature. Or something similar. Or subscription to a tag?

Like for example, when it comes to security and privacy and google-free-life all of us usually mentioned linuxxx and the gang. When it comes to server, if I'm not wrong Linux and electrical hardwares for Condor, etc.

But there might be (should be) other who should be mentioned and who would want to get mentioned as well.

Might be fun as well. All those Raven and clans can communicate easily with such feature.

Thoughts anyone? If I got positive responses here, I'll open a feature request on GitHub 🤔

Good idea. For electronics I find @7400, @Fast-Nop, @nin0x03 and since recently @GyroGearloose (still pretty much beginner though) to be quite interesting as well :)

But yeah.. the tech stack, if that could be made into tags, which are then groupable.. that'd be quite a neat feature actually!

@Condor yep, my thoughts exactly. Let's hear more voices.

@Alice , @Floydian , @linuxxx , @Bitwise , @CozyPlanes , @JoshBent , @xzvf

Tagged the names who use devRant on almost hourly basis :P

@cursee so people could join a tag and get notified whenever that tag gets mentioned? sounds great, but probably nowhere close to be made in near future, thought of how this could be made into a script and there certainly is an idea, but I am currently not in the mood to set it all up 😁 I'll write it down for whenever I am bored or have the energy to do something like that.

@cursee might have an easier non dynamic way of doing it, so could maybe set it up earlier once I get to it 😊

@JoshBent there is something I am still not sure. The potential spam effect (dozen of noti whenever someone mention "security") :s

That's why I also suggested the group feature. It would be cool if we can literally treat tag as group.

- Tag has owner/creator (so admin).

- Admin allow certain members to use the tag. (so not anyone can easily abuse the tag)

Or just implement the group feature separately on its own.

@Floydian I don't think you'd need subcommunities, there is definitely a mention system abuse you could do, but again, definitely some work yeah, I have an idea how this could be done though, so hopefully I'll get to it soonish 😅

@cursee I have a better idea, don't want to fully give it away though 😋

@Floydian was a topic many times, it's not viable for devrant to be open source due to the amount of work needed to operate such project and introducing people to the codebase etc.

@Floydian they are doing heavy minus last time I've heard

@JoshBent @Floydian making something open-source from the start is easier than transforming a closed-source into open-source.

You gonna need a documentation and coding standard and all. Which needs more work than actual coding.

Considering they have their full time jobs, I doubt time is not the resource they can spare.

However, I'm sure they are also considering how far will the two heads and four hands can go on their own.

Everything needs to be upgraded at certain stage after all. Evolution.

@Floydian dfox and trogus are losing money running devrant

@Floydian think he meant they are investing a lot with low ROI.

@cursee eventually they plan to get people onboard, but it's far away

@Floydian That question implies that if you don't support via membership that you're some sort of scum for ripping the system, neither do I nor dfox and trogus like that idea, it's supposed to be an open platform and people that can or decide - support it too.

@Floydian result of poor banking infrastructure and a business which doesn't guarantee monthly salary. (Visa and master came to our country for only like a year ago.)

Consider the monthly reinstallment of my study loans as bonus.

@JoshBent I believed that's not his intention behind that question 😬

But yeah that's a pretty blunt question.

@cursee I know it most likely wasn't his intent floydian is too pure for that, but still, indeed a spiky question to ask

@Floydian yeah I thought you'd not want any harm, basically just remembered how many people get asked that as some kind of argument or a form of guilt trip.

@Floydian see y'all later 😂 jokes aside there was already an attempt at getting some ads in, the membership helps to not go absolutely bankrupt, merch has been introduced, devducks, something eventually will hit the mass market and fuel devrant more, devducks was supposed to be something like that I think, but it just didn't hit the right bone (yet?).

@Bitwise @JoshBent @Floydian

Giving this group feature only to supporters.

Hitting dozen birds with one stone.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Or the ability to off certain setting only to supporters. 🤔 Something along the line.

@Bitwise @Floydian

Another income option is to have a deals/promotion corner where devRant can show promotions or deals of various online courses, tools, apps etc. Instead of ads like the rest of internet works.

And I believe it's what they are going for with the last survey.

@Bitwise the main offender was the avatar generation iirc, therefore needing a couple intensive server just for that, which already cost at least twice as much on DO, but don't think devrant is going anywhere soon, don't worry, you guys picked up on the wrong note, dfox and trogus are constantly evolving ideas, on a sidenote I hope @trogus stabilized by now. (tagged for the sake of him maybe telling if he's fine now, up to him)

@dfox / @trogus I know this topic is probably by now ringing your skull, but wouldn't hurt if we'd get a quick fix on things and maybe could get involved, I think I remember you said you guys don't want the exact breakdown of costs or a progressbar for similar reasons I mentioned above why the membership isn't supposed to be a guilt tripped buy, but how's it all standing, memberships still declining, ads didn't work at all, what are the options and why did devducks even though I think advertised not really lift off? (unique product, targeting the right people and more, sounds like a hidden gem) did reddit people for example not convert at all? other ideas you want to try? devrant running on last fuel? just a general check up since 6ish months ago so to say 😅

@Bitwise just sell his brain to science, that should be the quickest way to get some bucks 😰

@Bitwise I'm only good at idea generation. Sale and execution... not so much 😥

And after all, ideas are nothing.

@cursee ideas are the base of any project, how do you think devrant started? "wouldn't it be cool to have a safe place to rant?"

@Bitwise tbh I am in a similar boat, though I know the cost breakdown from what has been said before, from the endless hours I spent comparing DO to dedicated servers etc. so I kind of can guess, but at same time I can't know the actual backend, especially for the avatar generator as it seemed to just roll with a dedicated server whenever I did one - but again it wasn't as detailed with as many items as devrant has etc.

We could have a field for the profile in which to add the tech we use or are good at, and that could act like group tags or something

@balaianu good one, especially we already have those inputs. Just need to make a relationship with tags.

I could think of a group notification when there is a question. No stories, no rants, no jokes or memes. It could be tags of the format "Q:topic".

Besides hardware, I could also chime in on questions about C (but not C++).

Otherwise, PN could be implemented with spamming in mind, with two separate inboxes. One for general input, and one for messages from members that the receiving member has whitelisted. Messages on the general input could be deleted automatically if they havn't been flagged as OK for a certain time so that you don't even have to click shit.

One thing I'd like to have is a chat, though. That doesn't have to be something fancy; a good old-fashioned IRC channel would be fine.

@JoshBent membership isn’t declining and we hit our peak subscriber count a month ago or so, so that is very helpful and has made it so we’re very close to break even. I don’t think the progress bar is needed, and finances aren’t bad and Tim is starting work soon at his new job.

devDucks, like a lot of our other physical goods, did really well (sales-wise) but unfortunately are very difficult and time consuming to produce and expensive to ship. As a small business, we get absolutely killed by very high import and shipping fees, making it very uneconomical for our international users to make purchases. devDucks have also proven difficult to make and source, which has made us actually have to artificially lessen demand (raise prices) to sell less of them. We have trouble getting consistent quality materials and the cape creation process is very time-consuming. We’ve had to turn down requests for custom duck orders of 200+ ducks because we simply can’t fill them.

In general, physical goods are loved by the community so we’ve kept selling them, but the profit margins are very small.

We’re definitely going more towards subscriptions and add-ons and we have a lot more ideas around those. We continue to consider all ideas and there’s definitely some interesting ones in this thread. If anyone else has any more feedback, please let us know.

@dfox really glad to hear the finance stats are improving hooray.

Yeah physical items will always have much bigger constraints to sell when your users are literally through out the globe. So another feedback is to make money out of digital items.

A while ago, Alice had an idea of a devRant Magazine. I think CozyPlanes even created a collab for that. devRant can still be fun and rantful community, but we can also have a sibling community of well written dev topics. You can learn all the mistakes medium made 😬

And another suggestion is to recruit a good data analyst and see what kind of data can be extracted from our rants and sell to interested market. For example, there were definitely a flood of quantum rants after Mozilla released it. Maybe Mozilla guys will be interested to see the dev community's reaction on quantum.