So you are essentially asking the social group on discourse if they want to take over the diaries and are telling the users of the diaries that they should move over to discourse if they want to have a say in discussing that.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you simply miss the social function and the delicate social dynamics of the diaries. We are talking here about one of the few remaining communication channels hosted by the OSMF that still serve the original paradigm of OSM of bringing together diverse people from all over the world to openly cooperate in a self determined fashion without the need to subordinate them to a central management and an imposed communication culture. The naming of this as users’ diaries - as alien as it might seem to many getting started in OSM - is actually very fitting.
The very idea that you could integrate that into the nagging, patronizing and technocratic managed community paradigm of discourse seems ridiculous to me.
The irony is that the OSMF is currently spending the largest targeted external grant it ever received on work on the website (which the diaries are part of) - while at the same you consider stripping a hallmark feature from that website for reasons that essentially amount to cost cutting. Has this even been discussed with the people currently doing paid work for the OSMF under that grant?
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you actually read the post before reaching for the pitchfork.
Nothing in the proposal talks about “subordinating” anyone to a “central management.” It’s an engineering post asking whether a blogging feature bolted onto the API codebase should live on a platform that already does blogging, threading, and moderation better. That’s it. No one is stripping OSMF of anything — if anything, the diaries would gain a modern editor and proper moderation tooling that the current bare-bones form has never had.
And here’s the part that really undercuts your framing: https://c.osm.org/ is also run by the OSMF, and its moderators — same as diary moderation today — are determined by the community, not appointed by the faceless technocracy you’ve invented for dramatic effect. So the whole “self-determined cooperation vs. managed paradigm” contrast collapses on inspection. You’re not comparing OSMF-governed vs. independent, you’re comparing one community-moderated OSMF platform to another, one of which happens to have actual software behind it instead of a form from another decade.
You also skipped the practical upside, which is odd for someone so invested in what’s “essential” to OSM: diary moderation currently sits with the Data Working Group, a team created to handle data disputes — vandalism, edit conflicts — not to referee blog comments. Moving diaries to c.osm.org frees DWG to do the job it actually exists for, instead of splitting attention between data integrity and diary policing. That’s not “stripping a hallmark feature” — that’s letting the people responsible for the map’s integrity focus on the map.
And the “irony” you’re so pleased with — spending a grant on the website while “stripping a hallmark feature” — is a similar reach. Reducing the surface area of a codebase is the maintenance work that grant is meant to support.
What this actually reads like is discomfort with any change to a corner of the site you’ve gotten comfortable with, dressed up in grand language about paradigms and sovereignty that doesn’t survive contact with how either platform is actually governed. Maybe engage with the real open questions in the post — identity mapping, localization, migration cost, DWG workload — instead of announcing that asking the question at all is “ridiculous.”
OpenStreetMap
Discussion
Comment from imagico on 25 July 2026 at 11:56
So you are essentially asking the social group on discourse if they want to take over the diaries and are telling the users of the diaries that they should move over to discourse if they want to have a say in discussing that.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you simply miss the social function and the delicate social dynamics of the diaries. We are talking here about one of the few remaining communication channels hosted by the OSMF that still serve the original paradigm of OSM of bringing together diverse people from all over the world to openly cooperate in a self determined fashion without the need to subordinate them to a central management and an imposed communication culture. The naming of this as users’ diaries - as alien as it might seem to many getting started in OSM - is actually very fitting.
The very idea that you could integrate that into the nagging, patronizing and technocratic managed community paradigm of discourse seems ridiculous to me.
The irony is that the OSMF is currently spending the largest targeted external grant it ever received on work on the website (which the diaries are part of) - while at the same you consider stripping a hallmark feature from that website for reasons that essentially amount to cost cutting. Has this even been discussed with the people currently doing paid work for the OSMF under that grant?
Comment from andygol on 25 July 2026 at 16:28
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you actually read the post before reaching for the pitchfork.
Nothing in the proposal talks about “subordinating” anyone to a “central management.” It’s an engineering post asking whether a blogging feature bolted onto the API codebase should live on a platform that already does blogging, threading, and moderation better. That’s it. No one is stripping OSMF of anything — if anything, the diaries would gain a modern editor and proper moderation tooling that the current bare-bones form has never had.
And here’s the part that really undercuts your framing: https://c.osm.org/ is also run by the OSMF, and its moderators — same as diary moderation today — are determined by the community, not appointed by the faceless technocracy you’ve invented for dramatic effect. So the whole “self-determined cooperation vs. managed paradigm” contrast collapses on inspection. You’re not comparing OSMF-governed vs. independent, you’re comparing one community-moderated OSMF platform to another, one of which happens to have actual software behind it instead of a form from another decade.
You also skipped the practical upside, which is odd for someone so invested in what’s “essential” to OSM: diary moderation currently sits with the Data Working Group, a team created to handle data disputes — vandalism, edit conflicts — not to referee blog comments. Moving diaries to c.osm.org frees DWG to do the job it actually exists for, instead of splitting attention between data integrity and diary policing. That’s not “stripping a hallmark feature” — that’s letting the people responsible for the map’s integrity focus on the map.
And the “irony” you’re so pleased with — spending a grant on the website while “stripping a hallmark feature” — is a similar reach. Reducing the surface area of a codebase is the maintenance work that grant is meant to support.
What this actually reads like is discomfort with any change to a corner of the site you’ve gotten comfortable with, dressed up in grand language about paradigms and sovereignty that doesn’t survive contact with how either platform is actually governed. Maybe engage with the real open questions in the post — identity mapping, localization, migration cost, DWG workload — instead of announcing that asking the question at all is “ridiculous.”