What's great / good / awesome about Microcosm

I've just been singing the praises of the chance to use microcosm.app to set up a forum, starting a conversation about societies working for tree planting and care, to some people on a local tree committee I have just met with.

I had a sudden epiphany that a forum one tenth as good as this would be the best way to get the committee to engage, inform, discuss and grow to attract new interested residents ...

Then I went to the microcosm home page and read a very alarming notice!

What's happening @velocio?

The short: The company ran out of money, and we didn't have enough growth to ensure that we could raise VC money to do what we need to do to get the growth. The crunch happened, and carrying on as we were wasn't feasible even with another funding round to see us through (it would only postpone the inevitable).

The company is now winding up, the last day trading was October 31st and it takes a while to do the merry dance of HMRC. Investor relief will be triggered shortly thereafter.

As for what is happening to the product, most of it was open-source, and so the last few components were open-sourced too. We had sought a purchaser and failed, and that meant there wasn't anything stopping us from letting it go. The code is over at https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ though we designed it as a platform so it's presently a bitch to install.

I personally am covering the ongoing costs for the rented servers that are behind the LFGSS instance, and I've offered to the key customers continued hosting for the time being. I'm also fine with bringing new sites on-board... the software is such that small sites won't impact the costs that I'm already incurring for LFGSS.

I believe that 2 other people have now managed to download and install Microcosm. So there are presently three instances of the software, all effectively are platforms that could host many sites.

Right now there isn't much development happening. In part because I had to go get a job, and I'm getting married in a month. But also because... frankly I'm a bit depressed by what has happened and need a little time to deal with it.

I still love what we've created, but I'm largely taking a break right now. Matt's in much the same headspace, and also started another job. I know I'll come back to it, and LFGSS more often, but I'm just dealing with things right now.

As for your question, could you use it? Yes. It's still possible to sign-up and create a site at https://microcosm.app/ and doing so creates it on the LFGSS instance. I've had to pay for the domain names and cover all server costs, and if you sign-in (top right corner) you'll get the create site button. I'm only willing to do this for people I know, LFGSSers, cycling groups, etc. Essentially, I'm happy for LFGSS to host small communities given that LFGSS made this possible.

As for the future, I hope it continues to grow. I think we made a great thing. I hope it stays great. When I return to it, I want to make it easier to install, to use less hardware and to be faster... then add features that I always intended to add.