What's great / good / awesome about Microcosm

One click 'follow' button is better than the 'subscribe to this thread' command
It's much easier to noobs not used to forums (As seen on TABS microcosm)
Moar white + Bigger text= older people friendly
@xxxxx + #yyyyy work
And the awesome fact the the huge old clunky lfgss jumped from sinking servers to microcosm.app with no major issues is great
#looksforratethreadbutton

Pasting links actually works on mobile.

I like the way threads you are following remeber where you read up to and are still marked as NEW if you haven't read to the end of the thread

Just found out about the midweek rides forum, visited it and then followed it. Super easy.

Then used the search to come here and post about how fucking ace microcosm is.

It's fucking ace.

So the tweets say the numbers are all massively up.
Good stuff. Back to freshest forum going.
Its been emotional

All numbers up except one number which is drastically down... guests.

Basically we freaked out Google, which has been indexing heavily since, but Google has hit our search placements in the meantime so referrals from Google have been down massively since the tech change.

Even at this late hour I can learn something about the workings of the internetz. You have no worries, you understand the realm. Best wishes with the longterm

All numbers up except one number which is drastically down... guests.

Is that the only reason? I always used to browse as a guest and only log in if I was posting. I don't have any followed threads or whatever so it made no difference if I was logged in or not.

Now, the mozilla thing has me permanently logged and the site is a lot harder to use as a guest (mainly as clicking a thread takes you to the first post) so you're forced to browse whilst logged in.

The vBulletin version sent you to the first post if you were a guest.

Though there was additionally a link to the last post so you could jump to that, whereas we're just giving you /newest/ and as you're a guest we don't know that you've read any of it so the whole thing is classed as new and you arrive at the first post.

Good hypothesis though, I'll go dive into the numbers and see whether we've made guest browsing too hard.

That said, the number of members now here doesn't account for the drop in guests. Plus Google is showing clearly that they've sent fewer search engine referrals (there's a cliff in the chart showing the drop).

Number of microcosm users massively up. By migrating lufgus on to it...

Check out the ride event threads that @middleofnowhere is making in the midweek ride forum.

Just brilliant.

The pull down menu LFGSS on the menu bar above is a nice touch.
Like the links to #lfgss on Flickr and Instagram

This place is getting better and better...

The current following page is great, really like the level of detail. and I'm getting used to the different items.

I love that the LFGSS World Champion logo (and, by inference, probably always the current state of the logo) also appears in the Persona log-in window.

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?

See the microcosm sub forum

*sWhere? on LFGSS?/s*

Any thread in particular?

There's a map.

http://www.lfgss.com/conversations/256346/#comment11872966

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.

Hey @Velocio I don't know a line of Go, and I also don't know if its been built in a way that what I'm going to ask is possible. However when you're feeling like it would it be worth having an LFGSS 'learn2microcosm' evening (obviously other people are welcome) where you/maybe Matt could run a group of interested developers through amending/adding to the lfgss source, then anything that comes up that may nee doing, people can just make a PR for.

I haven't read through the source at all yet but I'm sure interested in giving it a go.

The code isn't that insane. Should be easy enough for most developers to pick up.

The only area which will cause issue will be the database schema. There are subtleties, there are tricks.

But yeah, I'd be up for that when the time is right.

Awesome

I'll send @Emyr down so he can sort our Manchester polo forum out.

1. Ain't nobody got time for that
   
2. Are you sure its not user error?