Thought I'd copy the update from HDVinnie on what's going on with Blu.
I am still here for BLU. I am still here for the torrent realm. I am still here developing UNIT3D. I will continue to help as I always have.
I’m not good at this and will admit that off the rip. So bear with me. I know I have a lot of haters so it is what it is but this is my attempt to let everyone know the story.
As most know I started UNIT3D from scratch in 2016 after being a dev for xbtit and u232 for many years under a different name and other trackers. I grew tired of hard to manage and simply bad code. In 2017 BLU was born as the first UNIT3D based tracker. I have dedicated the last 8 years to BLU and UNIT3D. They mean a ton to me and the community has grown tremendously. I helped as many other failing torrent communities that needed help with code and porting so they could survive.
BLU was self run for the first 4 years of its life in which we then started to accept donations. We never begged with weekly pms, news, etc. The community was strong and we chugged along fine.
We have gone through server issues in past and recovered just fine. These things happen and with daily backups it’s not an issue which we were doing. Locally and remote to other staff. One staff resigned. Then the other. This was in 2024.
BLU was booming. Peer growth, user growth, content growth and all around community growth was exceptional. Yes we recently had a horror month event. Saying we brought in thousands and thousands from it is just false though. I won’t debate it in a public manner. The community was booming and we brought back the upload bot server.
Here lies the issue. I have been drained. I had personal things I can’t and won’t get into. We recently had ssd failures which is a normal situation would be fine. Wait for host to replace and load a backup along with all kernel and dependency tuning. When the one staff resigned that was managing the off server backups I failed as a sysops to retract it to another staff and turn my local copies back on. That is on me. I take full responsibility and apologize. I am crushed just as much as you guys. Those that really know and interact with me would know this.
That being said this irc post makes it seem like I just went awol and resigned with nothing but echoes. That is not the case. Yes I have stepped down. Why? Because after 8 years I failed with something I know like the back of my hand. Simple backups. Is my personal draining and life issues an excuse. No. But it is what it is. It cannot be undone. For this I don’t deserve to be at BLU at that level anymore.
I am working with staff. I have transferred control. I am working to help and make things right from the outside. I will continue to develop UNIT3D that BLU and dozens and dozens of other trackers rely on. Anyone that was invited to BLU if they bring it back will be reinstated. I am already working on building list to resend invites for staff to use. Donor statues will be reapplied. Will it happen overnight. No. But BLUs community is one of the strongest so please don’t hate. Bear with us. For those that feel you were robbed. That’s simply not true and it’s really sad to hear that. Feel free to email me.
Such a good question. Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons: one cynical, one a little more practical.
Cynical first lol: Maxmize profits. Why charge once when you can charge monthly. I'll move off this bc it's a topic that's been beaten to death, esp. here on Lemmy.
The more practical reason is probably because most software interacts pretty directly with the internet in some way. When we were just installing MSOffice98 with clippy, software didn't need constant security updates, patches, etc. Remember when there was an update for MSOffice and you'd install Service Pack 1? That was one of the first patches I downloaded from the internet and it was a big deal back then. Now updates come out at least monthly, many times more often than that. I guess that means that you have multple product cycles occuring concurrently, which creates a financial model with a lot more unknowns... which in turn makes it harder to forecast what a product should cost, considering it would be the only revenue generated, per license for the life of the product.
I think selling a product is still a very viable business model, but you have to be a lot more accurate about revenue forcasting and product pricing. I guess it means you have a lot less room for error (from a business perspective).