I'm Shutting Off My Server on November 17
I'm going to delete the board. Not just the board but all of my backend websites.
It's kind of like...
All these sites are dreamed up from a craving of an Internet that is gone and never coming back. We shouldn't be trying to keep it alive. We should be taking it out back and mercifully putting a bullet in its head. Just like that brony thread should have been deleted.
November 18; that's when the site is going down. I'll at least make a static archive and keep that up but no one will be able to post anymore.
I'm okay with working on simple static sites but I don't want to make backend web apps anymore. I don't want to make anything with the expectation that there will be users and I don't want to be obligated to maintain the servers that my apps no one cares about are on. At first it's a fun thing but over time it turns into,
"Do I really want to keep paying the bill for this server?"
"Do I want to log in to the server to install updates?"
"Do I want to pay attention for CVEs for the framework and patch those?"
The answer just over time becomes, "Not really."
In the past you could make a silly thing and people would use it. I think to some extent it's a me problem: People don't like me so they don't want to use my stuff. But it's also, people are busy using the stuff they already use.
Specifically with the board, I'm trying to revive a culture of forums and imageboards that's dead. It's not the Internet being dead; it's the specific 2001-2006 hackerman forum culture that's dead. The type of people that use imageboards today are... bronies and other degenerates. The people that used to use those services left a long time ago. Even Something Awful is a shell of what it used to be, so if Something Awful can't even be Something Awful, how can I expect my site to be?
It's an idea that doesn't justify paying and working to keep it going.