It would appear that, after less than 72 hours in public Beta 1.0 mode, SocialGalactic is now shutting down, permanently – at least, in its current form:

This is hardly the first time one of our projects has taken an unanticipated curve, but even so, I’m sorry to have to inform everyone that SocialGalactic 1.0 has gone down for the count. By which I mean that we are permanently pulling the plug on this particular form of it. I’ll explain more in my Devstream tomorrow, but the long and the short of it is that the Infogalactic team has unanimously decided that our best course of action was to shut it down and return to our original Plan A of developing our own social media technology on our own servers.

While we appreciated the short cut that the possibility of working with Fediway offered us, after further discussions with them, we have mutually concluded that it is best for both organizations to go their separate ways.

Farewell, SocialGalactic, I hardly knew ye…

Be assured, however, that this is not the end, my friends. The full story of what happened will undoubtedly emerge tomorrow, after our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) tells us what happened with Fediway. But I have no doubt that SocialGalactic 2.0 is being developed, right now, and will eventually be released to full public usage in 2019.

My guess is that the FediWay interface just wasn’t doing what SocialGalactic was supposed to achieve. I’m not too surprised about this. There were quite a few bugs with the SG1.0 interface, and the notifications, icons, feeds, and streams on the site were all rather clunky. For instance, if you scrolled to the bottom of your feed, the FediWay icon would activate to show that the next part of your feed was loading – but nothing would show up. You’d have to scroll back up, then scroll down again, to see the rest of your notifications.

That is just one of several key bugs that still need to get squashed, and my guess is that FediWay just wasn’t responding fast enough to get the features needed to make this a real, usable alternative to Twatter.

I also suspect, though I have no evidence whatsoever at this point, that FediWay probably wanted to introduce some sort of Code of Conduct for users to obey (read: be enslaved by) on SocialGalactic. And if you know anything about the Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH), you know that he doesn’t do Codes of Conduct. He practically wrote the book on the reasons why such a thing is a horrible idea.

Anyway, we will learn what happened sooner or later, but the lesson, as always, is: fail faster.

Learn from your mistakes. Build your own infrastructure wherever possible. Become antifragile and resilient. Never let anyone else own you.

I can only admire His Voxness for being willing to stick his reputation and the loyalty of his many followers on the line by pulling the plug on a project that was just barely out of the starting gate. That takes BIG BRASS BALLS to do, especially since every last one of his enemies will now line up to laugh at him for failing so spectacularly.

I have a feeling they won’t be laughing quite so much when SG2.0 is released, but hey, who knows what the future holds.

All I know is that the idea of a “clean speech” social network, where the level of discourse is at a significantly higher level and the whole thing operates on a “trust but verify” approach in which everyone abides by an honour code that is mercilessly enforced to stamp out nudity, spicy memes, profanity, and assholery, is a Very Good Thing.

My experience with SocialGalactic was a very good one, overall. I do not use social media as a general rule, but I would definitely be willing to kick in more money for InfoGalactic and SocialGalactic, simply because these guys are doing good work.

While we’re on the subject of failing faster, by the way – I’ve been working on some of my own projects designed to establish a side gig and branch out beyond mere writing. The fact is that we live in an age of visual and auditory media; there are not that many dinosaurs like me who actively read and write.

My Loyal Readers are, to use a rather irritating modren phrase, teh awsum, but as Any Fule Kno, y’all are a dying breed.

The Hard Right’s message needs more than words written on a blog that can be pulled down at any time. So I will be working on a few things for younger readers and people with short attention spans – also known as “Millennial(tard)s”.

No, you won’t see me on video anytime soon. I may be a handsome and reasonably buff devil and all, especially by the (abysmally low) standards of this country that I’m in right now, but my hair isn’t particularly telegenic and my sense of fashion is, to put it mildly, quite hopeless – as every single woman who has ever been involved in my life, in any capacity, has told me.

Just sayin’, I won’t be doing streaming video anytime soon. Ain’t nobody got the time for that – or at least, I don’t.

But yes, there will be some announcements coming reasonably soon from me as well.

In the meantime – the Evil Legion of Evil, the Vile Faceless Minions, and the Dread Ilk will carry on doing the bidding of our Supreme Dark Lord (UHBP).

Eyes front and forward march, boys. Those SJW skulls aren’t going to collect themselves, after all.