Some years ago, I used a site called BitBacker. Basically Patreon with Bitcoin. It was a one-man operation, and it outgrew his ability to maintain. Another Libertarian/free speech platform called "Flote" (Boost VC funded) took it over and rolled all the users into its own platform. Some time afterwards, after a fresh round of funding, they started adding new policies that amounted to "we love free speech BUT...". It didn't take much time beyond that for the whole thing to collapse in on itself. I bailed as soon as the new policies were announced.

Similar patterns occurred with Minds.com (VC funding rounds followed by new terms of service, "think of the children" excuses, etc) and Gab-dot-com (free speech absolutists until they picked up a majority boomer-con religious audience, then heel turned into "anonymity/decentralization is for criminals and pedophiles"...almost literal quote from the owner/founder there).

Each time the only option for disaffected users was to pull up roots and start over from zero at the new place. I know people who ment from Gab, to Minds, to Flote, getting socio-politically rugged each time.

Many, like myself, ended up on the Fediverse. I run my own server that interoperates with a dozen others over the shared protocol. Some Fedi servers went full retard, but data portability features meant it was easy to migrate to a new home without losing your entire follow list.. in some cases it was actually seamless and I barely noticed the change.

I've come to feel that a site/service is only trustworthy if its creators build around the assumption that they'll eventually go under or be compromised. If there isn't a plan or an infrastructure to handle the survival of users/content beyond that point, it's not forward thinking enough. This is just a personal opinion, though, based on my own experience and observation, and I accept that some feel it's unreasonable and overly paranoid.

Collaborative multisig with chat partners. Nunchuk has something similar with BTC, but I would really like to be able to have a unified flow in-app to create, fund, and pay out a multisig wallet with one or more other parties.

I do use XMRChat, yes. Self-hosted vs centralized is the main difference. XMRChat has some other bells and whistles like adding social links into your profile, displaying active streams on the front page, and searching for other users, but those are kind of ancillary to the main function. Shadowchat doesn't have any of that, it just collects tips and displays messages.

I should note, this version of Shadowchat was created around half a year before XMRChat went live (and its preceding forks were even earlier than that), so at the time there wasn't any other option. Honestly, for most people XMRChat is probably the better, easier option. Shadowchat is better for the niche use-case of "I don't want to trust third parties to run web services for me".

Perhaps I'm gun-shy, but at this point I've seen at least a couple of good places go down in flames after the ownership changed hands, or started taking VC money, et cetera. The problem being that after it goes down, you have no choice but to start from zero at whatever the new place ends up being, and hope the cycle doesn't repeat.

This is why I'm so big on federated services over ActivityPub (Fediverse), the federation part makes it easier for the ecosystem as a whole to survive one particular site crashing and burning. The users might have to migrate, sure, but account portability is getting better, and there's even some work on totally nomadic identity. Rather than each site being isolated and competing with each other for traffic and users, multiple sites can mesh together and form a more resilient network.

#338667

According to this, the repo is currently private but will be made public in the near future.

I'm also very interested in this. Right now this looks like a single website managed by a single set of admins, which puts all the power in their hands (or whoever manages to take it from them). Experience has taught me this isn't always a good or stable solution.

There's supposed to be sourcecode released in the near future, which is good since at least then anybody will be able to spin up a new version of Stasher if this one gets compromised. Of course that also means every instance of Stasher's code will be in competition with each other.

It's a shame monero.town isn't more active, Lemmy being federated over ActivityPub leads a more robust network with multiple instances interoperating with each other. I guess bolting Stasher's XMR updoots to Lemmy for a fork would be rather difficult, though. Shame, because making Stasher a federated service would give it a good amount of censorship resistance on top of being FOSS.