Caveat: admin blues

[This is a cross-post from my other blog.]

<rant>

It’s all pretty depressing.

I try to be a competent and fair and innovative admin on OpenGeofiction.

Half the users hate me – I know this for an actual fact, because I see what gets said on the OGF unofficial discord channel.

And now I’m feuding with the “boss” too. I can’t win – I’m stuck in the middle. I’m not paid for this. So why am I doing it?

Perhaps I should go back to trying to build my own geofiction server and forget this. Although I derive a lot of motivation and inspiration from the OGF community, trying to be an engaged and active member feels like more suffering than benefit, some days. I would do better to not try to change or “fix” things, but that’s not in my character.

I don’t know if the creator of OGF and I really share much in terms of vision. To initial appearances, he seems committed to the “open-” part of the name, and to open source projects and concepts. Yet upon further examination, he seems utterly uninterested in trying to go anywhere toward working out a more scalable and/or sustainable governance model for the site. And for any sizable internet community (or real community for that matter), governance is actually important. So in the end, it’s just a personal fiefdom. I can feel sympathetic to that… – that’s probably how I would set my own site up. But then, what’s the “open” about? Is it just because he used the OSM stack? It feels like false advertising: “Bait and switch.”

This is just a rant.

</rant>

Music to admin by: Robbie Fulks, “America Is A Hard Religion.”

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Caveat: Poem #944 “Missing”

So I attempt to move ahead,
to set aside the brooding things,
but moods assert and dwell like dead -
like ghosts adrift on empty wings.

The spider webbing fills my head
with self recriminations, rings
of cloudy doubts and dreams, all led
across landscapes controlled by kings

who rule the shifting realms unsaid
and quite unsayable, till springs
snap shut and render into dread.

Perhaps in moving forward, then
I'll figure out solutions. When?

– some kind of sonnet, but it’s missing a line. Badly wrought.
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