thanks for your feedback and open words. In fact that a lot of people want to see MeteorPad alive, I am sure you are able to get the contribution you need.
I will bring up my 2 cents to your posted options:
In general this is a good idea also for some ongoing ideas but I think there should be also at least this central running instance which is used by all as (today) to link from StackExchange etc.
I am not sure how much ressources, system load and traffic meteorpad has token. Do you have some benchmarks oder measurements about that?
However, have you discussed with MDG to get a free plan for running that on Galaxy?
On the other hand, if someone had to pay for Galaxy, what pricing plan do you think would be necessary?
We have built up a lot of experience with running our meteor apps on Scaleway ARM servers. Speed was always good and pricing is top. Maybe we can have a short discussion about running on such an environment.
For my personal opinion - Option C should be the short track - to get at least for the next 6-12 month a running MeteorPad environment. During that time it would able to make the right future decisions for you and all potential contributors.
Option A is also ok to me, even if it just runs as gist but unbreak the currently dead links. In case that this will take some development time, I assume still option C as the fastes reanimation.
In any case thanks for being back and opening the discussion.
For a $1000 a month, a lot of people would be willing to help pay that, myself included. If only 100 users were willing to pay, that would be $10 per user. And there’s definitely more than 100 that would be willing to help pay for this.
Some people will be more than happy to just donate their funds. But to play devil’s advocate, I know there will be some people who want something in return. So what should that return be?
If it’s directly user-funded, you’d need some governance over things like issue resolution, feature requests, future scaling measures, cost transparency etc.
Alternatively, it could be a simple donation-based scheme (via patreon for example), or a traditional subscription offering with a paid level of service (perhaps based on higher performance or persistence options etc).
While I am optimistic that the community could foot the bill for the hosting, I think it may make sense to actually see what people are willing to contribute. Maybe dollars and time per month?
So that we (@mike) can actually have some numbers to look at?
Some great ideas here. I’ll happily chip in if it goes live. I’d love to see Meteorpad and also hassle free free meteor hosting come back in some shape. How about a time to live on each app and people can chip in if they like it and make it run a little longer?
First off thanks everyone for all the positive feedback! Some quick thoughts on some of the points you guys have raised so far
@cstrat I just emailed DigitalOcean to see if they have any interest in sponsoring. Hopefully, I hear back from them soon.
@tomfreudenberg I agree that Option C (raise money continue to host) would be the easiest and the best. But it’s definitely not the cheapest. I talked with MDG about using Galaxy a while ago; it’s not really a good fit since MeteorPad has to run apps in development mode. Thanks for pointing out Scaleway servers; it looks like that could dramatically lower costs.
@merlinpatt I’m a little more cautiously optimistic that it’ll be easy to get to $1000/mo. Do you count yourself amongst those who’d be happy to pay?
@batjko Something like Patreon seems like it could work pretty well. I’m not really confident it would work as a paid product, but if you guys have ideas for a premium feature that would be compelling for you I’m all ears.
@vigorwebsolutions Thanks for laying out what you’re willing to contribute. Now I just need 99 more of you I think I’ll put together a short Google survey just to get a rough feel for how much people are willing to contribute.
I’m a senior lecturer teaching Meteor at the University. Some months ago, with MeteorPad and the easy “deploy” command, Meteor was a really good choice for beginners with some basis in Javascript. Today, MeteorPad is gone, Galaxy is a paid service and I can’t say MDG really cares a lot about documentation.
I decided to wait some month before considering switching to some other framework, but the revival of MeteorPad could really keep me in. In such a case, I would contribute for sure, but you should consider some (affordable) educational plans. You’ll maybe find inspiration looking at CodePen.
I put together a short Google form to collect some data on who can help, and how much they can help. If you’re interested in bringing back MeteorPad, please fill it out and share the link with other Meteor users.
Hey everyone, I’m sad to say I won’t be pursuing any of the options I outlined above in the near future. Only option C provides MeteorPad’s core value, a trivial way to share full stack meteor code with other people. While some people stepped up with generous offers, the time and monetary requirements to support option C are too much for me to bear at this point in time. I’m still open to bringing back the project if the situation changes and I can get more support on this project. Thanks for understanding.
I own an online marketing firm and I can confirm it would be trivially easy to monetize something like MeteorPad. You would be crazy to throw away such a lucrative asset.
how about using something like https://www.patreon.com/ for governance of this?
I would be willing to chip in, but like @batjko said, you need to do accountmgt on this. Nobody wants to do that, but if we can outsource it?..
I literally just read about this on Joel Spolsky’s blog, and my first thought after giving it a spin was “Nice… but I wish it could run Meteor.”
My second thought was “but, wait, wasn’t there something like this for Meteor? I remember using that a while ago… MeteorPad or something?”
Next, I was googling MeteorPad, only to find out that it had been taken down. And that led me to this discussion.
Yes, HyperDev is nice… but really, wouldn’t it be nicer if it could run Meteor? With HyperDev, I still have to build my own REST API, manually configure my middleware stack, database access (does that even work? Do I hook into a MLab instance?), and use jQuery for server interactions (or set up my entire frontend stack by hand).
Honestly, it feels like two steps backwards from MeteorPad.
There seems to be a pattern here – MDG paying to host a nice party for everyone… and then leaving them stranded without any warning.
Of course I understand that @mike had to pull the plug once MDG stopped paying the bills… But they really could have done a better job helping to figure out a smooth transition, rather than simply letting it go dark.
…and I don’t know what makes you think he should be allowed to do that. While it might be nice to get back those meteor examples, I don’t know that I or many others would want their privately made meteor sketches dumped for all to see. Not to mention the thousands of Example To-do apps you’d have to sift through since it created a new to-do every time anyone came to the site. AND 1.4 makes pretty much all of those sketches I saw/remember/worked on obsolete now.
I think I’ll put together a short Google survey just to get a rough feel for how much people are willing to contribute.