I apologize about the ball dropping that one night. Something rather serious came up. Serious enough that priorities needed to be a little different for a couple of weeks.

But it is time to get back into the swing of things.

We're just going to use the poll we missed which means we are watching Nation Lampoons Vaction this coming Saturday at 9pm Eastern. Unless you guys are able to swing the poll: https://strawpoll.com/e6Z2A8NJMgN/results

Also there is a cool new feedback form on the matrixhub page.

Some of you guys know that I've been an advocate for work minimalism. That is minimizing the time you give an employer if your arraingments allow for that kind of flexibility. And instead that a person's ideal should be to focus on giving to community and generating their own sense of value directly.

I've been able to do that in part because I have been a work maximalist and spend minimalist in earlier periods of my life.

While my finances are still quite good a reprioritization suggests that now is an era of work maximalism. I believe in pursuing the two extremes. That's the thing about being a spend minimalist, is a dollar earned will always offer some utility eventually so you might as well have periods of your life where you over work knowing it will at least offset work in the future. That is until you have too many dollars to know what to do with them as a spend minimalist. Then you either need to adopt a wasteful lifestyle to spend the money (not my style), or realize that time is more valuable than dollars (what I ended up doing for a period), or accept that you are going to contribute far more to the system then you will ever get back from it (something I eventually learned to not accept because of how corrupt and undeserving our system is).

I may once again go into a work maximizing mode until I have stupid unnecessary money again. On a side not one of the things that has allowed me to get to that position in the past is the fact that I don't drink, smoke, or even have a coffee habit. Those are the kinds of things that end up scaling when you have more money. My income and my lifestyle are very independent things. And the lifestyle is minimal. I'd rather have periods of my life with increased free time than spend money on consumables, high depreciation vehicles, or more than the minimal rent.

This does not mean that all development on Matrix will cease. I will come in every now and again and modify a thing or two. But when it comes to movies that is something I decided we still want to do. I just may reduce some of the over marketing I was doing to several sites. A lot of these sites were significant contributors to polls but pretty close to zero users would come from them to actually watch the movie. So it's pretty much going to be reduced to Matrix, Voat, and maybe saidit for the invite list. I'll sometimes feel tryhard and hit the rest. The result on you guys will be almost impercevable because that was 99% of our showing.

But I will be doing things like that to be more efficient.

This brings me to another point. Because I will be adjusting my relationship and matra with my employer I will be becoming more of a yes man rather than the "I'm not available", "I'm not available", "Find someone else" mantra I've done for a few years as part of my work minimization efforts. I'm very good at what I do is why they put up with it. But the point is I may say yes when my boss wants me on a Saturday. I could always use some people I can call on to launch things. It really is bloody simple. Just hit play and chill.

Which brings me to my next point. Co-adminism.

The initial plan of matrix was to make almost anyone who seems even slightly reasonable a co-admin. The only thing that stopped me was the coding of any sort of behind the scenes features. There are some now. One thing is the badges. The badges are 30% about decoration and 70% about creating a permissions tagging system. That gives me really fine-grained permissions control compared to using admin levels that almost every social media site uses. Badges don't need to be worn to be used. But you can of course wear them if you want to.

I would like to name Larry as the primary co-admin, if he wants to accept it. I'd also like to extend general co-admin status to almost anyone here who wants it. There are very few users here now I wouldn't give it to especially when we have a fine grained permission system and and the main point of being a co-admin is to create a kind of council.

So this means everyone would be equal but Larry would be ever so slightly more equal. And I would be significantly more equal than him in some cases or exactly equal to everyone else in others.

Now I mentioned all of this segway'd from talking about movie night. I know Larry is really not able to help with that so I'd either ask others to step up in an emergency or we would move the movie time; to both make it easier for Larry to enjoy those movies and optionally help hit the play button.

So how would this council work? Larry has already been leading feedback threads. The council would just add a small degree of formality. It's just adding some democracy with only select people being able to vote. So it's no longer really my judgement call. This will create a work order that I will either do or delegate (or council delegates when that flows). In the case of delegation I would make the tools and permissions to make sure it can happen. Even if it takes slightly more more to create the tool than to just do it, it can still be worth it to invest in the technical capacity of the site to be community managed.

For this reason in feedback threads it now makes more sense to replace suggestions with proposals. I suppose what we'll do for the most immediate case is revive the recent feedback thread (either I fudge its age to make it new again or sticky it). That will let people write in more formalized proposals. In three days we lock the thread or more generally don't consider proposals written after that. In one week we start the voting and consider that done after a few days (two or three). Everything will be done in a week, or stretch two weeks, after that the proposal is considered dead. That way we don't have code sitting around for several months gaining incompatibility with the site as the site changes.

Now Larry. In the past you've been pretty open about advertising Rabbit Hole. I'm ok with that. I just want to say I'm open to doing more of that. Many sites are afraid of outbound links. But Google, which is pretty much the most valuable web property today, got there by only doing outbound links. More so than anyone else. Reddit used to be all outbound links. They've become a bit adverse to that with wanting to use imgur less. I don't know if that's been to their benefit or not that they changed. Either way they got to their peak unapologetic linking out. The point is I think a site is more cool and more useful the more it lets people navigate away and find cool things. It's better to be the stump than the leaf.

So I just want to say we can also provide your links into matrixhub for sure (Jason's too). And matrix as well, but I'm thinking that could be a good excuse for a more formal proposal item.

On matrix hub I'd just like a heads up if that's something you want to do because we'd have to figure out formatting. My "our forum" link on matrix hub is tucked away in some nice unused space https://cytu.be/r/matrixhub. A block of "Our forums:" would need to be placed somewhere. Either in the MoTD or in the left bottom panel that I just put the feedback form in. If a full block then we might as well commit and throw Jason's stuff in there too. IDK. Maybe this is becoming official proposal material as well with all the permutations of how it could be done.

Other sorts of variants of adding offical outbound links here is considering the pros and cons of adding another sidebar element. Maybe that is a vote consideration is the competing space on different devices. It might put chat below the fold on smaller screens. So variations of addressing that are adding click expandable sidebar blocks or including something in the footer (the footer should be more populated anyway) and giving those things a full page. Another alternate is to have an addition side area that expands, to having some kind of a drop down menu at the top (another things that may be be useful for other things but I haven't added because populating it with zero, one, or two items would be a strange menu). So if we do that we would need more things to add to it if we did a menu. Logout, profile, settings, mail. Some of those are there already. They could either move to such a menu or I'm even ok with some redundancy just to fill out the menu and also keep things like mail visible.

Action items for all of us:

Larry, can you get back to me if you want to be primary co-admin.

Me: Revive the suggestion thread.

Everyone: Get back to me if you want general co-admin status. It's no real commitment.

Me: Create the co-admin and co-admin+ badge

Me: Expand some of the checks behind the scenes to check for a co-admin badge instead of an admin badge.

Larry: Tell me if you want links in matrixhub

Me: Share admin/moderator status on matrixhub with almost anyone who wants it.

Jason: Do you want links? I assume yes because you of anyone love links somehow even more than I do.

Also note on the whole voting on proposal things. When voting on things please consider the scope and necessity of what you are selecting. Remember the goal is not to give me an infinite work queue of every item that is better done than not done. It's to select the best ideas to do in a one week period that is community driven rather than selected by me (with a second week for over budget). And we'll do that once a month with one week dev sprints.

Areas of proposals we need: Marketing, graphical, functional, and also tooling you guys want for co-admins. Marketing is pretty major because things have slowed down in the four weeks I've been away.