Offsite status page

[denise]

We've been looking for an alternative to Twitter (excuse me, "X") for our offsite status announcements of the "shit's fucked enough that the site won't load; we're working on it" variety, and have finally settled on Bluesky as the correct choice for that purpose! If you are a Bluesky user, please follow https://bsky.app/profile/dreamwidth.org; if you aren't a Bluesky user, please bookmark that page.

(Side note because I know people are going to ask: yes, we'd like to add Bluesky (and Mastodon) to the username shortcuts, but the way they construct usernames and profiles is complicated enough that we have to give it some extra thought on how we're going to be able to do it!)

Comments

[mellowtigger]

That's a very good list of requirements. Would it help to see what other news and network organizations have done? Here are a few well-known names and their server choices. Looking at these sites, even the smaller ones might be amenable to hosting an account for Dreamwidth notifications.

https://newsie.social/@ProPublica
https://mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot and https://mastodon.social/@netblocks
https://techpolicy.social/@internetsociety

[denise]

We will not be maintaining more than one service as an offsite notification location; having more than one place to update also drastically decreases the likelihood someone will do it in a crisis.

We are talking "several posts a year" volume here; this is not a "we will be posting every day and it doesn't matter when people see it" volume level like your examples. It's purely an offsite status page for if the site is down and people will need to be able to see it if the site is down. "Good enough" uptime isn't for that purpose.