Lucian Marin
Selling Subreply
People on Subreply are pretty upset with me because I decided to make the service available for purchase. I understand the feeling. I understand the sense of betrayal. I understand that Subreply stands for something unique in a world full of chaos — Subreply itself is chaos ordered.
Why
If tomorrow I die, Subreply dies with me. I don’t want that. Do you want that? Does anybody want that? I didn’t build Subreply for profit; I built it to get my name on Wikipedia. I haven’t got there yet — still working on it. But the idea stands: Subreply is Subreply, no matter what.
The moment I decided to sell it, something bad happened in my life. It made me think, and think again. What do I want more: Subreply just for me, or Subreply for everyone? Open sourcing it is easy — I make the Git repository public, a flip of a switch. But that’s my last option. Selling it to the right team or company is the hard way, and I have always taken the hard way in my life. I’m not going to change now.
Plans
If messages take off, I will probably remove mentions. You’ll get the same feed through search, using a recent-sorting algorithm. It’s easier to send a message than to write someone’s @username and then hope the other person answers you publicly — tech illiterate people don’t even understand how mentions work. Removing them will also streamline the code.
I also want to introduce rooms on Subreply. They will work like messages, but everyone can write in the same #room. As you may have noticed, I’ll use hashtags to redirect people to rooms. Creating a room will be tricky — can I do it automatically? Another tricky part: how do I perform search on rooms? And yet another: will it work without mentions support?
Closing
I listened to a speech by Mircea Cărtărescu where he discussed his latest book. He talked so beautifully about dimensions — multiple universes, the multiverse theory — that it made me realize Subreply is unidimensional. It’s completely linear. That might be a good thing, but also a bad thing. Messages is another dimension. Rooms is another. But all of them should serve the same common purpose: enabling people to communicate.