last year, I started the Rust Herald. It was intended as a service for general announcements that could be propagated to twitter, RSS and other media. It is based on the popular Elixir Status.
Sadly, it hasn't caught on and it basically just accumulates cost. The service has 100 users and most of them are inactive. While I still believe the idea is interesting, I can't invest the time on growing and maintaining the service.
The Herald will shut down on in two days, on July 12th.
If anyone wishes to take over promotion and costs, I'd also be willing to transfer ownership.
Ha, that was quick. I'd still be very happy if it continued!
The approximate cost is mostly a postgres database on Heroku (70$), although I would also agree to cover these costs for a while longer if you want to migrate it to something cheaper. I can also see myself sponsoring it a little to allow you to focus on growth. My company currently foots the bill.
That's more than I would have expected, does it need a db that size of is that just to get the benefits of not using a hobby level.
Also do you have any idea's why it's been less successful in the rust community. I'm fairly new here and am not sure what I could do in the short term to promote it
It's not a huge DB. The problem is that many things lead to rows being inserted, specifically quite some user action (it tracks visits in an anonymous fashion). The actual size is small (24.8 MB), but it blows the row number allowed for hobby (10000).
I think the biggest problem is that we don't have many people to promote and maintain it. We have a couple of users that really like it, but not many people promoting why it makes sense and how people can use it. Buy in from some projects might help with that.
I sadly don't have enough bandwidth for that, but would be willing to lend any support and channels. I also spoke to my co-founder: if the service gets more maintenance, we'd also be happy to cover the costs further.
So I have thought hard about this and don't think I can really own running this. Would be nice but I don't think I would be able to do much and it might just me a massive distraction from really getting into rust. which is what I want to do first.
Happy to add to promotion efforts if anyone else was interested in this thread.
@crowdhailer would you be interested in maybe doing some lightweight promotion? (It's basically: "use it and talk about it when the thought crosses your mind")