As the title says, the Zig subreddit is no more.
Andrew closed it because of the recent Reddit stuff.
Personally I think it’s a good riddance because I always recommend against building stuff on someone else’s platform.
Also I think this can be an opportunity for Ziggit to grow. I think the forum originally didn’t have much traction because people got burned by the first Zig community forum that disappeared a while ago. Hopefully now this can be an opportunity for people to reconsider.
This forum is pretty nice to use, wouldn’t mind if there’s no Reddit. So /r/Zig closed forever?
Personally I think it’s a good riddance because I always recommend against building stuff on someone else’s platform.
Agreed
BTW, how is this forum hosted ? I looked for the info but no luck so far. Just wondering because if the community grows and we have a lot of traffic, that could start to be less reliable than the subreddit
Closed for the foreseeable future at least.
It’s a self-hosted instance of https://www.discourse.org/ managed by @dude_the_builder. I dunno about the specifics of the hosting machine, but I think that if this forum is even remotely reasonably implemented, it should be able to sustain no problem the amount of traffic that the Zig subreddit had.
r/zig never really got big, and always felt a little bit like a train station.
Awesome, thanks !
r/zig never really got big, and always felt a little bit like a train station.
Time to make Ziggit shine then. I feel like having a self-hosted forum really suits the language values.
Hey all! Your friendly neighborhood forum admin here. ;^). Ziggit is running on a VPS, pretty low specs as it’s been pretty small traffic and load since the beginning. I monitor the server to see if it’s keeping up, and if resources get tight due to higher traffic, I’ll upgrade accordingly. So let’s see how it goes now that /r/zig is gone.
Discourse is a really powerful forum solution, but I still think it would be really cool to re-create such a platform based on a Zig foundation. I just saw @kristoff 's post on zap an HTTP server in Zig, which could be a great starting point. Aside from being really cool, I’m sure it would require extremely less system resources compared to Discourse’s Ruby on Rails atop Docker stack.
Well, isn’t every platform someone else’s platform, unless you host it (or it’s a distributed… blockchain thingamajig that stores content everywhere at once).
Anyway, the point I would like to raise is r/Zig content. I don’t know about you guys, but I have learned a thing or two about Zig from it. So I would love to be able to access it somehow, even if in read-only manner.
I mean, I’ve posted several times over there, and the conversation with good people of r/Zig in the comments helped me clarify several questions I had. I’d really love to save those posts, especially since there’s no books on Zig (not even bad ones).
So, OFC I will try to find URLs of my posts in my browser history, and save them locally via Wayback Machine, but wouldn’t it be great if we could post the entirety of r/Zig somewhere?
I meant that from the perspective of who creates the community. From that perspective you can either use someone else’s platform (eg reddit, discord) to create your community or self-host. In the second case you get to own everything.
Anyway, the point I would like to raise is r/Zig content. I don’t know about you guys, but I have learned a thing or two about Zig from it. So I would love to be able to access it somehow, even if in read-only manner.
I share the same viewpoint. There are numerous valuable answers to Zig-related questions in r/Zig. When you try to Google a question, r/Zig often appears in the search results. However, now I can only access it through web snapshots. 
Update: most of the posts I care about were captured just once by web.archive.org, right after they were created. Without comments. This is bad, as the answers provided in the comments is what you really want.
Google web cache is better, for whatever reason their cache contains some of the comments (but not all). https://cachedview.com/ provides a convenient way of getting both versions.
@dude_the_builder Just want to say thanks for setting up, hosting, and administrating the Ziggit forum!
P.S. I agree that a Zig-powered forum application would be awesome.
P.P.S. I also enthusiastically support the Reddit exodus.
For those out of the loop, is “the recent Reddit stuff” the move to charge for APIs? Or was there some other drama in the Zig subreddit?
In any case, I support this. I’ve never made a friend in a subreddit, but forums and IRC channels are different. Reddit in general is a hype factory for producing content. User eyes are the product, and ad revenue is the primary source of income. I can’t knock it too much, they’ve made a good platform that has facilitated some good and unique content, and that’s a pretty basic business model of social media, search engines, and mobile apps these days. The point is not community building though, I don’t believe that’s the primary incentive they’ve baked into their business.
It’s about the API change, yeah. A ton of subreddits pretty much decided to go offline (some temporarily, some not?) as a show of protests regarding the (apparently) high pricing on the API usage. /r/zig appears to be among those that will be down for the foreseeable future.
This is in my opinion an interesting short read on why r/Zig never really worked well, and overall why Reddit is what it is.
I would like to view old posts on r/zig.
Seeing as the sub has closed and moved to another platform, can we make it public for posterity but prevent new posts?
glad you decided to cut-off the sub. Even though it’s unfortunate that some old posts might not be available anymore (though that’s partly the case thanks to waybackmachine it personally think this is the way to go.
That’s up to Andrew, he owns the sub. I personally think that cutting our losses with Reddit is the best approach.
One nit: Ziggit has existed for a fairly long time now, the sub hasn’t exactly “moved”. I do understand though that the name makes it sound this was created as a reaction to Reddit, but that’s not the case, as least wrt the latest Reddit drama, since Ziggit is more than a year old.
Yeah, agreed - I like the idea of having a place to talk that stands away from all the big drama (even if it’s legitimate) of the large social media companies. Funny enough, my formative years were in the 90’s and I remember smaller forums quite fondly. It really will become what we all put into it.
I used to run a forum-based community. I was very happy when I bought my vBulletin license, good times.
Oh, you own Discord, nice. 