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I’m now the sysop of Lobsters, a social news site focused on technology.

Its creator jcs announced three weeks ago that he was ready pass the torch. I’ve been very active on the site, submitting tons of stories to help get the flywheel turning on a solid community. I want to see this good community continue and grow. With the support of the irc regulars, I stepped up to become the new administrator.

We planned the migration and executed it last weekend. There’s a handful of tidying-up tasks on the to-do list, but everything’s running smoothly on the new server.

The Lobsters codebase has been open source for years and I’m now maintaining it. There have been some great contributions from community members and I’ve tagged some issues to encourage new contributors. The new ansible playbook for configuring the site is also public, so hopefully it’ll now be very easy for more people to set up their own sites using the codebase.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about managing communities in the last week, but I think I’ve already expressed most of my thoughts about it on Lobsters over the years with comments on what I think Lobsters is for, the environment I want to foster, difficulties with brief text on Twitter, and my approach to effective moderation.

If you’re reading this blog because we’ve met or spoken, please email me for an invitation. Otherwise, check the user list for someone you know or ask in chat (mention what you want to contribute or link a personal site/github so they know you’re not a random spammer). Hope to see you there!