Waterfall Staff

Hello everyone - it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?

You might have noticed that Waterfall has kind of fallen by the wayside for the last year or so, and it’s time to discuss why. There’s a few main reasons. The first is just a severe bout of depression on my end, but that’s boring so we won’t discuss that (sidenote: It turns out therapy works. 10/10, highly recommended).

The much more pressing issue is the matter of the British Government. For those who’ve been around for a while, you might remember a post a while back about something called the Online Safety Bill. For those who don’t -

Each word here is a separate link about it. In truth I started writing this post months ago, but the evolution of the Bill meant that whenever I had something written, it was already out of date - just like those links probably are at this point. I’ll let you do your own reading, but it’ll be kind of obvious why development stalled - when half of what people do online is about to be criminalised, is there a point to continuing? Luckily (imagine that in air quotes) things are settling with it now, so we can talk about it. Let’s start with something fairly upsetting to say, and I apologise for my French in advance - The Online Safety Bill is absolutely fucking horrifying. It is SO much worse than the posts a year ago about it expected. It’s evolved to mandate jail time for site owners for the actions of their users, have mandatory ID verification for users to prove their age (as well as segregating unverified users from the verified ones), and a bunch of other horrible things. Take a look through CyberLeagle and Ms. Burns’ blogs and you’ll see the worst of it, including the cool and fun “hostage taking” part of things. So, policy-wise, things aren’t great.I’ve been thinking long and hard about things. I firmly believe that smaller, alternative sites like Waterfall need to exist. With that in mind, I don’t want to shut up shop and leave a sign hanging on the door. To try and deal with the problem, I’ve taken the very time consuming, very expensive, option of incorporating in the United States. This means… a lot of different things, which I’ll go into in another post, though I will rattle the tip jar (Patreon and KoFi are in the footer) if you have a spare five bucks, this has cost me a grand and a bit so far.So - that means the project isn’t abandoned. However, there’s some inescapable pitfalls and I need to cast aside the “I made this” defensiveness for a moment to look at the site with a critical eye. Waterfall as it is doesn’t quite work. It started as a Tumblr alternative when they were bringing in bad policies, but… Tumblr didn’t die. This leaves Waterfall filling a niche that doesn’t need to exist. There’s been a handful of discussions taking place in a small part of the community and the general agreement is that it needs to change, at least a bit.

To that end, I’ve put together a quick poll. It goes a little in-depth and has some free-form answers, so please take your time and think about what you want - your answers will be used to shape Waterfall, or, if more people think a totally fresh start is in order, its replacement. We’ll have the opportunity to shape and re-mould the site into something far better than it is now, both as a platform, and on a technology level, so if you have twenty minutes to spare, please do consider filling it in.

There’ll be more coming soon about what’s going on, but a heads up - I’ll be doing some minor upgrades soon, and moving the server. This’ll result in a short downtime in a few days.

But for now - we’re back.