A Letter to Our Community

Hello everyone!

At the end of last year, Tebibyte Media slowed to a crawl and eventually ground to a halt. The start of this project has been a complicated and painful process of birth, re-evaluation, and rebirth. Here’s the main thing we learned: a Tebibyte Media with me as its Benevolent Dictator for Life cannot function.

The Network was a relatively popular concept but it wasn’t where our strengths or passions as a group lie. It also doesn’t focus on the well-being of a community, and our level of control over that community is a net negative for everyone involved. Because of this, we are moving on to focus on being a resource that advocates views rather than one that provides public services. Our collective strengths are found in what we can research, develop, and publish on our platform and the strengths I saw in the friends I brought onto this project were wasted on menial Network and blog work that no one wanted to take advantage of.

Our current goal is to be a fusion of the leading figures, communities, and organizations we all value. The simplicity and importance of the Unix Philosophy, the free software ethics we all share, security, privacy, helpful programming practices, and the modern, memory-safe programming languages we love to build tools with.

Because of this shift in goals, we have decided that it is important to part with the community we have built. This means that the Discord will be made read-only later today and will later be archived publically and deleted. Keep an eye on the blog and we’ll let you know when the public archive is ready.

The work we want to do presents a conflict of interest: if we directly control the place where our community exists, we are not really capable of keeping a finger on its pulse. We want to give y’all the opportunity to govern yourselves, to put it simply. The community should come into existence on its own terms, not because I had some fans and friends who want to support me as a personality.

I will also be stepping down as the BDFL of Tebibyte Media and as such relaxing my full control of its infrastructure. Because of this change, y’all should expect actual creative blog posts from me, as my time maintaining almost all of the services we provide on my own is over. I will also relinquish my ability to have the final say on what we do here.

Though almost all of this change is internal to myself and the group I’ve built to help me with this project, it will have real effects on our ability to put out good and useful content. Plus, I’ll still be the most charismatic face here!

Soon, almost everything Tebibyte Media-related will be getting a facelift. Sit tight—we are all college-age, some students, some working more than full-time jobs on top of this hobby project to make ends meet—it might take some time. This change is pretty big but I hope it will have a lasting positive impact on the free software community.

Thanks for all the support, Emma Tebibyte