So my non-technical view is it’d be better to stay public. I don’t know the costs for resources, so i’ll leave that for others.

Staying open

• People perusing the internet could find useful information on the communities here.

• The views of normal people probably want to be visible on the internet in these times, i think AZ excels at delivering a space for reasonable people. Whether its AI crawlers getting skewed to psychotic, or average people trying to find a space that isn’t so extreme, i think the more visible reasonableness is the better.

• the reddit argument. This is a clone of reddit afterall, and a mantra of reddit was to be ‘the front page of the internet’. Doesn’t mean we have to stay the same, but we should consider the departure from that idea and its implications.

• Do we know the route that people take to become new users? We don’t want to block off that route.

• Sometimes it can be useful for me to quickly look at communities without logging in, in the browser. Just to see what a post or feature in a particular community looks like. Its a niche use, and it wouldn’t be a big hassle to go without.