Tobi raises a very important question over at his site: How will antville.org scale to thousands of weblogs - not from a technical point of view, but from that of quality of hosted content - and how should we deal with weblogs that publish illegal/disgusting stuff?

This is a difficult problem and I don't have the answer here. Yes, we will need disclaimers and the right to delete illegal stuff and all that. But quite honestly I don't want to spend my days combing through thousands of weblogs trying to find stuff to delete.

So here are some additional ideas.

First, we need to let people know that Antville is not just a weblog hosting service, but also an open source project, and that anybody can download a copy of the code and start his or her own server. Agreed, this is not for your grandma, but since one Antville installation can easily host dozens or hundreds or thousands of sites (the number being limited by the site owner's choice rather than technical limitations), the technical savvy and bandwith out there should be enough for everyone. The reason why most free web hosters are heading south is because their business plan was based on becoming huge, but there's actually lots of people out there with the means to host weblog communities of moderate size.

Right now, we're emphasizing on weblog hosting as opposed to software. But we can shift that balance any time, and I think the Antville.org site should reflect the idea of Antville as a software as much as it does the idea of Antville as weblog hosting service. If we succeed with this, there's a good chance that we see a lot of personal, mid-size and large Antville sites instead of a single huge one.

But it's not just size (or the lack thereof) that matters. It's that the right people attract more of the right people. I think this has worked very well so far for Antville. If I look at the weblogs at Antville.org today, there's lots of them I really dig and I can't think of one I really despise*). Also, one can sense lots of connections between different people and weblogs, both folks that knew each other before and folks that got to know each other here. I think we should try to keep it this way.

So here's a list of things I propose to do:

1. Get some disclaimers that declare that we're not responsible for the content hosted on *.antville.org weblogs, and that we have the right to delete illegal disgusting stuff.
2. Make sure we don't have to rely on point 1 regularly by
   • letting our Antville.org users be the primary recruiters of new Antville.org users by letting them do what they do, that is blogging.
   • push the idea of Antville as freely available software that can be installed and used by anybody anywhere.
   • resurrect AntClick, Chris' one stop Antville-in-a-box package.

*) The case of that sunken nazi singer weblog is really the exception that proves the rule. I really think that a weblog hosting nazi propaganda would be capsized by other Antville users before anybody of us admins would have a chance to wipe it out. It would simply not work.

[Macro not allowed in sandbox: comment.link] Dieses Interview gab Sir Karl Popper im Februar 1982 der französischen Wochenzeitschrift L’Express. L’Express: Ist die Toleranz nicht deshalb problematisch, weil sie ihre eigenen Grenzen in sich trägt?

Popper: In der Tat. In der "Offenen Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde" habe ich vom Paradox der Toleranz gesprochen. Die unbegrenzte Toleranz führt fatalerweise zum Verschwinden der Toleranz. Wenn man sogar gegenüber den Intoleranten tolerant ist, wenn man nicht bereit ist, die Gesellschaft der Toleranz gegen die Angriffe der Intoleranten zu verteidigen, dann werden die Verfechter der Toleranz vernichtet werden und die Toleranz mit ihnen. Ich will damit nicht sagen, daß man die Äußerung von Theorien, die die Intoleranz predigen, immer verhindern muß. Solange es möglich ist, sie mit rationalen Argumenten zu bekämpfen und sie mit Hilfe der öffentlichen Meinung im Zaum zu halten, wäre es falsch, sie zu verbieten. Aber man muß das Recht beanspruchen, ebendies zu tun, wenn nötig, sogar mit Gewalt. Denn es kann sein, daß die Verfechter dieser Theorien die Diskussion ablehnen und ihre Schüler lehren, auf Argumente mit Fäusten oder Waffen zu antworten. Im Namen der Toleranz müßten wir dann das Recht in Anspruch nehmen, die Intoleranz nicht zu dulden.