They’re Coming After Us Now

They’re coming after us now

Hi.

A Timeline and History of MLKSHK, MLTSHP

👋 Hi, I’m Brad Choate. Here’s a recollection of my involvement with MLKSHK and MLTSHP over the years. The following is pieced together from bits of email, Twitter, TypePad, Tumblr, database records, and aging neurons.

A timeline of mlkshk.com

Domain registration - 4/13/2008

Initial commit from Andre - 3/13/2010

First commit from Ivan - 10/1/2010

AWS database created - 10/20/2010

First posted file (“farrrrrt bird”) - 10/27/2010

First users created (82) - 10/28/2010

Opens to limited audience - 10/28/2010

First TypePad blog post - 12/29/2010

Opens to wider audience via invites, waitlist - ~¼/2011

First comment - 1/11/2011

Opens to general public - ~4/26/2011

First commit from Mark - 5/19/2011

Shutdown announcement - 5/1/2014

Andre is hired at Slack - ?

Shutdown averted? - 6/18/2014

Shutdown averted announcement - 6/30/2014

First commit from Brad - 8/3/2014

Good Web Bundle promotion - 11/19/2014

Subscription woes - 5/20/2015

More subscription woes - 7/9/2015

Subscriptions restored (delaying another imminent shutdown) - 3/24/2016

Final shutdown announcement - 2/22/2017

Enters read-only mode - 3/31/2017

Waxy.org post about MLKSHK’s closure - 4/13/2017

Closes - 5/1/2017

Lifespan from 10/27/2010 - 2,379 days, or 6 years, 6 months, 5 days.

Lifespan extended 3 years from 5/1/2014 shutdown announcement.

A timeline of mltshp.com

Continuation community assembles itself… on Facebook?! - 11/3/2016

mltshp.com domain registration date - 3/9/2017

Initial commit to Github by Brad - 3/17/2017

Fundraising - 3/24/2017

Gettin things done - 3/31/2017

MLKSHK user login support - 4/30/2017

GIF to Video feature - 5/9/2017

First Tumblr blog post and launch - 5/16/2017

Dropped Google Analytics - 5/10/2019

2019 State of the SHP - 8/29/2019

Site search introduced - 9/3/2019

4th birthday - 5/16/2021

Fastly CDN switch(back) - 12/22/2022

6th birthday - 5/16/2023

Happy 7th Birthday - 5/16/2024

Lifespan to date (as of this writing on 12/24/2024): 2,780 days, or 7 years, 7 months, 9 days.

Some personal history

I joined MLKSHK by invitation on January 6, 2011 as a regular user. I found MLKSHK to be a breath of fresh air compared to your typical social media site (which still holds true today). After the shutdown announcement in 2014, I tried to offer help and reached out again around July 2014 after the announcement that the site would not be closing. I had met Andre once before, but mostly knew of him through colleagues at Six Apart. Andre took me up on the volunteer help… remember, by this time he wasn’t running MLKSHK as a business, so the ~3 years that follow are maintaining the site as a hobby, particularly since it was still losing money.

Initially, I helped with site performance issues, including some query optimizations. As time passed, it became clear that the site was still in danger of closing due to the cost of services it was incurring, which was not offset enough by subscriptions. So Andre and I went through a cost assessment process and we identified a number of things that could be done. Switching away from Fastly to a cheaper CDN (KeyCDN at the time) shaved CDN operational costs by 66% (Fastly charges 12 cents per gigabyte of transfer and KeyCDN charges 4 cents) so we started there, since it was the easiest change to make and had the most impact.

I also helped with the site’s participation in the “Good Web Bundle” promotion which brought in a few subscribers and returning members. The following year (2015), we had to rebuild subscriptions from scratch since both Tugboat and Amazon payments had to be retired, and we replaced those with Stripe. Alas, the site was still just not able to sustain itself as it was, and a decision was made to close for good in 2017.

Before that happened, the MLKSHK community began a conversation with Andre to transition the site to a community-run operation. I wasn’t involved in discussions, so don’t have insight into the choice behind creating a new domain and brand instead of adopting MLKSHK outright (I suspect Andre just preferred a clean break). Andre agreed to share all data and source code to the transition team. I helped with transitioning the source code for MLKSHK; cleaning it up for the basis of the MLTSHP repository to become an open source project.

It was decided that it would be best to make MLTSHP more closed in nature… so much of MLKSHK was open to free users, even some allowance for post creation. The plan was to relaunch with a membership requirement, but also with two price plans - the regular $24/year membership (plus an option to specify any amount over $24/year if the member wants to), and a new $3/year membership which effectively was the same level of service that was provided for free registered users before. While posting was being restricted to members, we wanted to keep certain things open for all: our “Popular” page, and individual post links which can be shared anywhere.

There would be some downtime between MLKSHK’s closure and the launch of MLTSHP. We aimed to keep that downtime low, but it gave us some time to make some larger changes that would make for a more sustainable and cost-efficient service.

Switching off of Amazon AWS for web server and database service was a big one. I had wanted to do this for MLKSHK as early as 2014, but we never did. I took a snapshot of AWS expenses from January 2017 and costs for that month were $400 (just RDS + S3 + EC2 and outbound data transfer to our CDN). We switched these to use Linode. For CDN service, KeyCDN was more cost effective than Fastly was, but we decided to switch to using Cloudflare for CDN since it wouldn’t cost anything (ironically, MLTSHP has since switched back to Fastly after receiving an offer to operate at no cost). The only remaining AWS feature MLTSHP is using is S3 for block storage. There are some cheaper S3-compatible services available, but the potential savings have never justified the task of a migration. Operational costs today are less than half of what we were spending for AWS alone, and we pay nothing for CDN service.

We also set up a real deployment process, utilizing Buildkite (they offer a free account for us to use), making it easier to test and deploy community-led changes. This also included utilizing Docker which also makes it easier for contributors to run their own copy of the site locally for development.

Ahead of MLTSHP’s launch, a service was built that would transcode GIF images (a popular, but heavy file format) to video formats that those would serve instead of the original GIF file. This was a cost-saving measure, since popular GIFs lead to a lot of traffic, so the smaller the better.

Another must-have for relaunch was a process that would migrate a user’s MLKSHK data when they signed into MLTSHP. This required us to load all the MLKSHK data into the MLTSHP database (in a separate set of tables) and we also had permission from Andre to make a wholesale copy of the MLKSHK S3 bucket to MLTSHP’s S3 bucket so all images were preserved.

And we also had a full rebranding to do. Replacing all site design and assets so that it was different, but retaining the spirit of the original site.

There have been a lot of changes to the site since that time. We’ve added site-wide search, responsive design so the site works well for mobile devices, support for light and dark mode, an alt text field so images can be described, and many other things. Big feature releases are few and far between, but the site is stable which is a great feature.

Our Github repo has had 412 commits from 26 different contributors. There’s still a lot of stuff to do (patches welcome)! But the most important feature we’ve developed is a self-sustainable community. We don’t have to worry about closing.

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