It’s hard to believe, but Xanga has been around for over a dozen years. In that time, we’ve soared to great heights… and then come back down to earth. Through it all, we’ve stayed with the site for over a decade now.
We’re now at a crossroads, as our lease is up soon on the networking facility where we’ve been hosting our servers. As the status quo is no longer possible, we’ve been working to figure out the best way for the Xanga community to move forward.
We’ve seen other sites go down different paths… some have sold their sites to the highest bidder, while others have doubled on their own platform. The thing is, it’s really hard to grow a social site that has fallen from previous heights. MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal… lots of people have tried to resurrect these sites, and it has rarely, if ever, worked.
ANOTHER PATH
We started to wonder if there was another path. We started building the Xanga website back in 1999, and it’s amazing how much has changed in the past almost 15 years! If we built a site like Xanga now, we’d use a lot more open source software – heck we’d probably even build on top of some of the existing open source blogging engines out there, and port users over from our existing custom platform.
We’d focus the site on what we have always felt was its core strength: the Xanga community itself. And we’d get the community a LOT more involved in running the site – especially when it came to fighting spam and trolls, the bane of any community site. It would be a blogging community by the people, for the people and of the people.
As we mapped it all out, we thought: “Is this possible… could we build this??” Continue reading
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