RIP Offbeat Bride Tribe: 2007 – 2015 (+ bonus musings on running leaner)
Fall of 2007, after dozens of requests from blog readers, I decided to set up an Offbeat Bride community on Ning.com.
“It’s an experiment!” I said.
“We’ll see how it goes!” I said.
“If it doesn’t feel like a good fit, I’ll shut it down!” I said.
That was eight years, two platforms, two community managers, dozens of volunteer moderators, and over 45,000 members ago. November 2015, the Offbeat Bride Tribe quietly shut down.
Forums are dying
For the last four years, the Offbeat Bride Tribe’s traffic has been in decline.
Across the web, forums are dying as we all increasingly default to social media like Facebook. What does this mean for the future of the Tribe?
Why Tribesmaids forget about the Offbeat Bride blog (and how it hurts the site)
Six months ago, I promised Offbeat Home & Life readers a forum, and a few readers have been asking what’s going on with that. Here’s the deal…
Flickr, Pinterest, and Instagram: my strong feels, as both a user and a publisher
I have some strong feels about photo hosting online, my friends. Over the last decade, I’ve watched the landscape of photo hosting websites shift, from a time when there was nothing decent, to a time when there was something amazingly awesome (Flickr!), to a time when there were tons of options, to time when there are a few front-runners (Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram) none of which work as well as the tools we used back when I got married in 2004.
This post is long. This post is probably overly emotional considering we’re talking about web apps and photo hosting. But man… photos are my memories, and as a publisher, photos are part of my business model. So let’s get out our hankies and our rallying fists in the air and talk this shit over.