Draft about the history of exozyme

content/posts/exozyme-project-dead-long-live-exozyme.md

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+---
+title: "The exozyme project is Dead, Long Live exozyme!"
+date: 2024-06-08T17:41:33-05:00
+draft: true
+description: "A brief history of exozyme and how its mission and I have changed"
+type: "post"
+tags: ["exozyme"]
+---
+
+
+If you look on the Wayback Machine for the [first snapshot of exozyme](https://web.archive.org/web/20210817172243/https://exozy.me/), there are a few curious differences from the current homepage. The logo is different of course, but the title and catchphrase are even more different. exozyme (no caps) used to be "the exozyme project", "the libre, high-performance, privacy-respecting cloud". Now, that project is dead.
+
+I initially envisioned the exozyme project to be something like envs.net crossed with G Suite. I was naive at the time and discovered Nextcloud and Matrix and believed they were the future! I also started Gitea, PeerTube, Jellyfin, and Mastodon instances, all with cookie-cutter exo-something names. Today, exomedia, exotube, and exocloud are dead, I'm the only person on exocial, exogit is only used for exozyme development and my personal projects, and exochat is actually healthy.
+
+The success of our Matrix instance is because exozyme made a long pivot from being a bunch of services to a computing-focused community, sort of like MIT's SIPB or my high school CS club. The people involved switched from being "users" to being "members". It was no longer a project, but rather just exozyme, a community. And I also became busy and found it much easier to run fewer services, let community members run the rest, and just moderate a Matrix chat and update the server every once in a while. This transition began two years ago and has only finished recently.
+
+When I look back, I don't see "the exozyme project" as time wasted, but rather I got to learn a lot about computers and communities. Even if my original goal was a complete failure, exozyme has still grown into something better.
+
+A few days ago, I was thinking about how exozyme could be better, and in terms of technical aspects, it's fine. But I think we're missing traditions and a culture, but these things take a long time to organically develop. I mean, it's not like we're devoid of any culture now, since we have our April Fools' Day tradition, exofortune (which still doesn't have many quotes from our chat), and the notorious Hyper Bot and Haiku Bot. But I think exozyme started off as a quirky service provider (remember when we had the anime background for the remote desktop login?) and a lot of it has been lost in transition from project to a more computer-science-focused community, especially with the huge influx of new members. Our website just doesn't have that much personality anymore (no more FUQs, although that's probably a good thing), and I tried adding some of it back with some frivolous questions for the application email, but it's not quite the same.
+
+I also feel like a lot of people joined exozyme for the exozyme project, and might feel a bit out-of-place during say, the algorithms discussions and stuff. But no worries, since anyone can learn about cool algorithms!
+
+Maybe the same has happened to my own writing. I showed my blog to someone I met recently and he commented that it looked very academic. There's definitely more, OK this sounds really narcissistic, but creative genius in the earlier posts (for instance the DC megathread) that are missing in the recent ones. It's not because of ChatGPT (which was only really involved in the AInion post), but because I'm maybe unconsciously trying to sound more professional. I do have a more professionalized website (not sharing the link) but I guess I shouldn't worry as much about employers seeing my site.
+
+I'm in Austin, Texas right now and one of their slogans is "keep Austin weird". Maybe I should try more to keep my website weird.