CrankySec

State of the Blog

Howdy! It's December, and I thought I would give you some updates on the state of the blog, with some bonus info on the 32x33 Institute. It's been a year, friends.

This whole thing stated back in February, and I had literally no expectations for CrankySec. I thought I would rant a little bit, abandon the blog, and move on with my life. You know, like a normal human being. But we got a bump from Brother Ludic, then another bump from Tildes folks, then a bump from HN, and, next thing we know, I can't just abandon the blog and move on with my life.

We don't keep track of referers, so most of the time I don't know where people are coming from when we have a surge on Discord. Unless I ask. But, we do have some stats. During normal operations, we get around 700 unique visitors per day, with the last 30 days seeing 12.4k unique visitors. CrankySec is—at least for now—completely free to host: it's just 11ty, Cloudflare pages, and GitHub. I write the Markdown on Lunar Vim, git push, and that's it. There are no ads or trackers whatsoever. I mean, maybe the Buy Me A Coffee thing had some trackers, but we don't use that anymore anyway. Also, huge thanks to everyone who donated. More on that in a bit!

The whole point of doing CrankySec was to see if we could find some concrete way of helping each other out through collective action. A co-op. An union. A guild. A collective. Anything at all. That proved more complicated than anticipated. I mean, it was anticipated because we know collective action is fucking hard. We did a lot of research, but we couldn't get over the "Ok, let's do it, then!" hump for various reasons: it requires money, it demands time, you need to de-anonymize yourself, you need to get lawyers involved, and that costs money, etc. I haven't given up on that, but a different approach might be needed. Which leads us to...

The 32x33 Institute. The plan was to have some sort of semi-serious place to host the writings of our fellow Crankies, and, quite frankly, that thing is a delight to run. Even with all the hurdles. 32x33 is not free to run like this here blog. It's a self-hosted Ghost instance we run on Hetzner. Our Hetzner bill is around $10/month, so nothing major. The main expense is fucking Mailgun, and that's some $15/month. Which is a lot given the number of subscribers we have. And I use the term "subscriber" very loosely.

I have no idea how many unique visitors the institute has, but it's not a lot. We have 27 "subscribers", all of them on the free tier. And that's totally fine: it doesn't cost that much to run, no one is supporting themselves through their writing there, and I very much don't want to run ads on that thing either. That being said, I would really like to compensate our writers, even if it's just a symbolic $5. Also, we do have the ability to turn any of this into a legitimate business at any time. I have an LLC.

The future of the 32x33 Institute is up in the air: I'll keep it going until folks stop writing. And you can absolutely contribute: drop by our Discord and let me know. We started it early October, and, as of right now, we still have "funds" to keep it running. Let's talk about "funds", then.

We got $474 from our February fundraiser, $70 from Buy Me A Coffee, and $239.35 from the Store. This money is being used to pay Hetzner, pay Mailgun, and pay for the domain registration. We also donated $100 to the Internet Archive. Nothing to write home about, but not too shabby either. The store is interesting because it's super-duper easy to just churn out products. But, since we're not selling hundreds (or dozens) of anything, we don't really have economies of scale. I am pricing stuff there as low as possible, but I understand that even that might be too much. I mean, $8 for some stickers is insane. Add taxes and shipping to that, it's double insane. Apparel seems to be a better deal. I say grab the SVGs from the repo and print your own stickers if you want.

We also started something of a POSSE strategy. Don't know what that is? It stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, and it's just a fancy term for cross-posting shit. We publish here and over at 32x33, and link to the articles on Mastodon and Bluesky. No Xwitter, because fuck that. I am itching to start a LinkedIn page mainly to shitpost, but we'll see. This cross-posting is performed by hand or via a self-hosted N8N instance, depending on my mood. I need to work on that a little bit to make it fully automated, though.

About our Discord: What a treat! We started it right after this blog because a couple of people wrote me asking for it. Today we have around 1050 members, give or take. From the mods, to the top users, to the lurkers, to the ones who join and immediately leave: thank you so very much. I have learned a lot there, and that thing is not even one year-old! Special thanks to our mods, even though their job is super easy because people there are very chill. With the exception of one very minor incident, we've had no issues at all. That's really impressive. If you're not there, do join!

Random tidbits: