Thinking about the demise of Cake, led me to review some of it's earlier threads, from before the pandemic; there is so much really great stuff that might be lost, which I find very sad.

I really miss the B&W photo threads @StephenL used to host

Book recommendations and reviews

Travellogues and motorcycles, and books

Discussions of history, like @Chris fascinating experience attending the 75th anniversary of D-Day

I'm going to the 75th commemoration of D-Day in France next week! What to see?A great friend and I went for coffee last week and he said he booked bed & breakfasts in Paris and Normandy for the week of festivities and why don't I come? I could leech off him, all I needed was ...www.cake.co

Sadly, due to the way the data for the pages on Cake.co are parsed, I think, one cannot even print a copy of a thread as my printer only sees the first page or two, no matter how long the thread is. I suspect the same will occur if one tries to save the thread as a pdf, although I haven't given that a whirl yet. And the linked images do not appear in the text either when printed.

Even threads about Archeoastronomy and back yard photography of celestial objects

Unexpected Gems from Utah - Archeoastronomy in Fremont Culture and Fantastic Videos of the Night Skyhttps://photos.smugmug.com/Travel/Death-Valley-Muench-Workshop/i-2vcwKcL/0/f52ac2ce/X3/Fremont%20Indian%20State%20Park%20sign%20-3936-X3.jpg I was wandering through youtube, with no particular goal ...www.cake.co

And these are just a very tiny tip of a very large iceberg moving through time....... and hopefully it doesn't melt due to "heat"

agreed to this - I enjoyed the photography threads - even as a very amateur photographer with an iPhone !

I do think the Pandemic and Political Chaos of the last year have exhausted everyone and so much.

@Chris are you still considering cheaper software still to move cake?

Wow. Did not expect to see this. I've been busy in the lab recently and writing about all the books I read this year (which I just posted) that I just did not see this when it was posted a week ago. Truly saddened by the prospect of Cake closing down. It was my new home for my writing after Google+ shuttered, and if Cake is no longer an option I'll need to find a new place to write 😥

I did notice a drastic decline in activity this year and I thought countless times about asking/posting about it but just never got around to it. I figured with the pandemic and the US election that people just didn't have the energy, time, or motivation to write about anything else. I myself have been less active this year (I think), but that's down to me just being busier with my PhD.

I hope Cake can figure out a way to stay alive, but if not, it will truly be a big loss.

This is something that @JazliAziz has brought up multiple times on here. For good reason, I think.

I didn't just bring up the idea of more promotion on Twitter, I even volunteered to run the account 😆 I'm on Twitter every day and it wouldn't be much of a hassle for me.

If Cake wants to be "reborn" in a way, and if the team needs some help with managing the Twitter account I'm still happy to offer my time to volunteer.

That you did! Thanks!

Yeah, I'm a social media buff as well. So, we could have a couple of us step up and run it if needed. You'd get first dibs because you volunteered!

I did notice a drastic decline in activity this year and I thought countless times about asking/posting about it but just never got around to it.

Yeah, there were a couple of factors. One is that at one time we had employees and made it part of their jobs to post every day in order to generate content because content begets content. It's a common strategy to get a site to critical mass. For example, we hired Victoria just to create content. When we couldn't afford her anymore, she went to LinkedIn, where she just writes content. She came from Reddit, where she did the same.

Traffic to Cake has continued to rise due to SEO so some articles get thousands of views, some tens of thousands and a few get >100,000 views. But the viewers are not converting to new posters.

Some of our employees went to Apple as we were unable to raise another round of financing and they still love us but can't post because they own some stock in Cake and Apple's employment contracts prevent all conflicts of interest and distractions.

You were one of the people I thought of constantly because of your amazing articles that you post. BTW, happy to give you logins to our social media accounts, and @slamdunk406 too. We were really fortunate to get the @cake twitter account.

I know, it kills me! One of our engineers who still loves us wrote a script to convert any complete conversation to HTML, so we have that option.

I've been giving some thought to doing an instance of Xenforo on cakery.io to demo how good we can make it and exporting a few conversations to it. If we like it, it can replace the current code on cake.co.

Yeah, send the logins our way anytime! It is way cool that you got the handle @cake on Twitter! 👍

Yeah, there were a couple of factors. One is that at one time we had employees and made it part of their jobs to post every day in order to generate content because content begets content. It's a common strategy to get a site to critical mass. For example, we hired Victoria just to create content. When we couldn't afford her anymore, she went to LinkedIn, where she just writes content. She came from Reddit, where she did the same.

No wonder she went missing. What about @StephenL? I noticed his absence too.

You were one of the people I thought of constantly because of your amazing articles that you post. BTW, happy to give you logins to our social media accounts, and @slamdunk406 too. We were really fortunate to get the @cake twitter account.

That'll be cool. Hopefully if given some time we can try to get some momentum going and bring more people over to Cake. I just saw a new user comment on my book post a while ago. He just joined 5 hours ago. Not sure where he joined from, but it shows that we still get the occasional new user signup. Just need to keep them on site and encourage them to post.

Victoria still posts when she gets a chance and we exchange Christmas gifts, etc. She's wonderful and makes great posts when she gets the chance. Did you see her post on NorthlandZ?

NorthlandZ: All aboard to one of New Jersey's most unique attractionsIn Mid-October, I ventured from New York City for a brief field trip (socially distanced and masked, of course) to visit NorthlandZ, which is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for being ...www.cake.co

I can't speak for StephenL other than to say his personal circumstances changed with his career. We've exchanged a few warm emails but I haven't seen him tweet in awhile either.

let Cake go over the rainbow bridge

Chris, I may be too naive, but what exactly do you mean by that? Can't you just let it run another year or so, without much expense?

You were one of the people I thought of constantly because of your amazing articles that you post. BTW, happy to give you logins to our social media accounts, and @slamdunk406 too. We were really fortunate to get the @cake twitter account.

@Chris, what about volunteer work in other regards? Related to this discussion, I've recently had a look at available topics, just to see where it might make sense to focus attention. I saw many topics that have just a few followers and/or which were used only once or twice before being forgotten.

Some of these topics could probably be merged or deleted, or past conversations could be looked at to add them to more (or more relevant) topics. Perhaps the "categories" on the search page could use some love as well. I don't know how much help this would be, but I imagine that the current assortment of topics can be both overwhelming for new users, and off-putting if there's just a handful of old conversations especially if something is being advertised via Twitter at the same time.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea yet what I'm talking about in terms of scope, and for long I'd even be willing and able to work on that - so I can't emphasize the "volunteer" part enough - but if you think that working on this in whatever fashion might help even a bit, we could talk about that as well.

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Referring back to this reply by @S4-John in the 'I Told you so' topic, could Ghost be a suitable option to replatform Cake on to? John mentions it's very Cake-like in it's interface.

Ghost is very similar to Cake in it's writing and commenting interface, it's a joy to use, but it's not really suitable to run a multi-poster and many comments site like Cake at all.

NodeBB  is based on the same kind of event driven node.js architecture as Ghost, which makes is really fast compared to most PHP based forum software, and it would be an option that would need a lot less work.

Aside from that there is forum software. Xenforo, of course, which is a more "traditional" forum platform I guess, but also something like Discourse or Flarum. We are in the middle of implementing a Flarum based forum for a client and I'm really liking it.

Personally, if it were my project, I would seriously be looking at the options for reducing the maintanence and dev costs of Cake as it runs now but staying with the custom codebase that it has. I'd open-source the code and try to attract people to participate in developing new features, reduce reliance on any expensive external dependencies and replace things that can be replaced with good well maintained opensource libraries.

I love the look and feel and function of Cake as is, and that would be the best way to preserve and build on those things.

If that's not an option then any of the things I've listed above would be a good base for building a new version. I'd probably shy away from Discourse because it's heavy in resource use and it just looks like Discourse which is everywhere already. NodeBB, Flarum or Xenforo would be fine though.

Chris, with parler being kicked off of the AWS cloud today you're seeing some of them coming here.

Just a heads up.

So is it staying or going?

Shh . . . was hopin' Chris would forget to pull the plug . . .

Haven't you ever heard of Schrödinger's cat?

I'd just throttle it down a bit on 'simmer', leave it with one CPU and 64 Mega Bytes of Ram, replace hard disk with a floppy.. It will be a bit sluggish but hey, who can look a gift horse in the mouth? And power it with solar energy..

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

LOW←TECH MAGAZINELow-tech Magazine refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message; high-tech has become the idol of our society.solar.lowtechmagazine.com

..else I really don't know what else to say!!! Im gonna miss "Cake"

Heard of it??? I gassed it.

Wow Chris. I just ran across this as I was thinking about sharing my latest podcast episode. First of all, I am genuinely sorry to hear this. I do believe you and your team had built something special. I really did enjoy my time on Cake but there was a point where I felt that at least for me, my form of engagement, wasn't really a good fit for Cake. Without a doubt it was more me than your network. I have found podcasting to be a good fit for me as I am not restricted as much in the confines of the written word in my exchanging of ideas. (But man has there been some incredible exchanges on Cake - for awhile there nothing could match it) BTW if you are ever interested, I would love to have you on the Podcast to talk about your experiences and your role in this ever evolving plot to build a better web. My podcast is TheEmergence.io. All the best to you Chris and thank you for building something so special!!

I am/will be sad to see Cake go. In terms of saving the content, I think a worthy approach would be to try and contact the web.archive.org team to see if it's feasible to get the site crawled and archived before the lights go out. I am very thankful for everyone who made this space possible and had great conversations going. Getting a critical mass is never a simple thing, and sometimes it just doesn't happen. We barely made it with freefeed.net, even though it was initially just an attempt to rescue the remains of the original Friendfeed's audience.