I regret to inform you all that an atheist blog network, OnlySky, has announced that they are ceasing publication. We first announced that OnlySky was setting up shop 2 years ago, mentioning that Hemant Mehta had snubbed us casually.
There aren’t any media outlets that cater specifically to atheists,” he said. “All the other atheist specific blogging networks are run by volunteers and people who are passionate about the subject but don’t do business-savvy anything, so they falter and die. This one has digital expertise.
I could cruelly remind them of the irony of that “falter and die” comment, and that despite our lack of business-savvy we yet continue, but I honestly regret that we’re losing such an attractive and well-designed website (and that I’m jealous of their professionalism), and hope that the good writers working there can find new homes. I’ll read them where ever they end up.
There were numerous complaints about Only Sky’s commenting system, and they were never addressed.
This is not good and I’m sad to see them go.
I just read their farewell message and it didn’t have a lot of details on why they are shutting down.
I’ll add my 7 cents worth as a serious reader and sometime commenter.
.1. OnlySky was a continuation of the Patheos Nonreligion blogs, after xians bought Patheos and decided the atheists and seculars had to go. I’d estimate that half the traffic at Patheos was the Atheist section.
It was an active place with a lot of very good writers.
For a while it was even the home of Ed Brayton, a found of FTBs who I still miss years after he died young.
.2. When they set up OnlySky, from what I heard, they rejected the Patheos model of a lot of blog writers on one subject.
I thought that was a mistake, inasmuch as it was working well for Patheos, despite the opposition of the new owners of Patheos.
Places like Freethoughtblogs and Patheos Nonreligious are social media!!!
There are more by many orders of magnitude places where I can read on any topic on the internet.
There aren’t very many places where I can comment and discuss my interests with a large number of other people though.
What was bringing people to Patheos Nonreligious was more than reading, it was commenting and reading the comments. It is an active experience rather than a passive experience of reading say, Google News.
This is BTW, what successful places like Reddit, Discord, Mastodon, and the old Twitter also do.
You are combining social media with affinity groups.
.3. I did visit OnlySky and noticed that there wasn’t much new content from day to day. Despite having a long list of writers, most of which never wrote anything.
It was such that I could visit once a week or once every two weeks and not miss anything.
There also wasn’t much timely coverage.
A nonbinary student is murdered in Oklahoma, it shows up on Pharyngula FTBs a few hours later. A short look at Only Sky and I didn’t see anything a week later.
That being said, OnlySky had some really good writers and I know some of them will keep writing somewhere.
And, I will find them and keep reading them.
I mostly read the site for “Roll to Disbelieve” but the poor commenting system made the active community they had at Patheos quickly die. They tried to move it to discord but discord triggers my “whiny Boomer” instincts that surprised me for actually existing.
Hemant appears to be doing fine btw. A quick glance suggests each post gets an average of hundreds of comments.
You know, ike Pharyngula about 15 years ago. ;-)
https://www.friendlyatheist.com/
(Sorry, but live by the snark, die by the snark.)
Well, you could snatch all of them for ftb if you feel so inclined. :)
What about Substack? Now that’s a site one should go to set up and read blogs like this. And how about Medium? That site’s good too.
@4 Silentbob: If you are judging by his posting at OnlySky, you should probably use the past tense. There doesn’t seem to be anything newer than January 2023.
@Reginald Selkirk #7
That’s when Hemant left OnlySky and moved to Substack.
Is OnlySky like OnlyFans for aerial pics?
I’m on an e-mail list from Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer. I got a message a while ago (I just looked for it and couldn’t find it) saying that he was leaving substack because it was Nazi or something something. Is anyone aware of that controversy?
Substack being Nazi-friendly was in the news a while back:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/
https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/substackers-against-nazis
Maybe at least a few of those writers can come back to FTB. This platform always worked better anyway. OnlySky sure looked nice, but it wasn’t that easy to browse around, and their comment threads were incredibly wonky and had way too much indentation. And, as others have said here, there wasn’t that much new stuff coming out in a timely manner.
Now maybe if Respectful Insolence can improve their platform, which is even worse than OnlySky’s…
It was hard to navigate. They tried to expose you to all their writers by making it hard to find the one or two you cared about and they didn’t narrow the focus. Think Huffington Post without the woo
OnlySky was a continuation of the Patheos Nonreligion blogs, after xians bought Patheos and decided the atheists and seculars had to go.
They also seem to have dumped the Pagan blogs as well. There’s “Contemplative” and “New Visions,” but they all look pretty Christian to me. In fact, the whole enterprise seems to have shrunk A LOT, and I’m willing to bet Dave Armstrong is now the loudest and most prolific voice in the whole place.
I always knew Patheos was Pathos.
Shame about the exodus from here to there, were some good blogs.
(But, $$$)
The layout was shiny but made it annoying to find new posts. But that wasn’t the problem.
The atrocious comment system is what drove me away – it somehow combined the worst of disqus with a 1990s spam filter in terminator mode. There were numerous complaints which were all ignored.
Sorry to see them go. But only 3 or so writers made any kind of regular postings there. Only 2 have commented on the closing so far. There were also podcasts from some, but they haven’t had anything new since mid-last-year.
Roll to Disbelieve has their own site where we can follow Captain Cassidy.
https://rolltodisbelieve.com/
Jonathan MS Pearce mused about where to go next, maybe here?
Other sites like The Orbit became pretty dead. I guess I’ll follow individual creators where I can.
M. L. Clark has also posted about the closure, and posts at “Better Worlds Theory”, https://mlclark.substack.com/.
I imagine we’ll hear more from others, like Adam Lee. It’s only been a couple days since the announcement, though others probably knew it was coming.
I checked it out early on. I agree with all the criticisms here. It was poorly organized, too few regular posts, and the commenting system was garbage. Lots of people complained, and all the complaints were ignored. For people with such “business-savvy” they couldn’t have driven away readers more efficiently if they tried.
@19
Yeah, they drove the commentariat away and then wondered why there were so few readers….