YammyDigital.net, one year later…

I was reminded last week that it’s been almost one year since I registered the YammyDigital.net domain (the registrar was reminding me to renew), which has caused me to stand back take an honest look at what YammyDigital.net has become over the last 12 months. By any measure the site has been… a complete failure!

For those who have never heard of YammyDigital.net (I’m not surprised), here’s what it was supposed to be: A place where fans of Yamaha digital sound consoles could discuss them. See, a few years ago there was a site called PM5D.org which had a very vibrant community discussing the PM5D console, and it became an invaluable resource to me. But the site kept getting hacked and it was running on the owner’s unstable PowerBook or something, and all of the content was lost at least two times. It struggled along and tried to recover, but eventually the site just went away.

After waiting 10 months for it to come back, I decided it was gone for good and started YammyDigital.net, hoping to provide a new place to discuss these consoles. The only problem was that I had no way to let the masses know that it existed, and no one came. Sure, I tried to add the site to various search engines, but that didn’t do much good, if any. A few people signed up at the beginning but quickly faded away as there was never enough “critical mass” generated. The only regulars the site gets today are bots trying to get around the CAPTCHA

Ironically, literally a week or so after I started YammyDigital.net, I got a note from the PM5D.org guy that his forums were back up! (Talk about timing!) You might think the reason YammyDigital.net has never taken off is perhaps because everyone simply went back to the resurrected PM5D.org forums… however, if you take a look there today you will see that they are nearly as sparse and empty as YammyDigital.net is, and hardly any of the old community seems to have come back… and he had the advantage of emailing the news to a list of existing users from his old forums. I think this serves as a perfect example of how fragile online communities can be. They can be thriving and alive for years, but can dissolve instantly when the site goes away for a significant period of time and never recover, even if it returns.

What will be the future of YammyDigital.net? I’m not sure. Clearly they are doing no one any good right now, but renewing a domain is pretty cheap and the server already exists, so… I will probably give it another year before crying uncle and throwing in the towel. In the mean time I’m still looking for “that place” to discuss Yamaha digital consoles, since mine clearly isn’t it…