The end of this forum as we know it troubles but does not surprise me. The reason I find it troubling is because this community has provided a comfortable and familiar place to connect with my community. This forum has given me a place to write about my experience with diabetes and receive some resonance from others.
It’s not perfect, however, and I’ve had to make many adjustments necessary to bridge the inevitable gap between the “me” and the “we” inherent in any community. TuDiabetes has performed admirably over the years particularly as it successfully knitted together the T1D and T2D communities, again not perfectly but better than many digital forums.
Another strong point is that TuD provided a place for me to write in a longer format, more detailed way. This, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be the preference of the younger TikTok and Instagram generation, but that is OK. We must all look for community where we can as that need remains and opportunities will arise just as TuD did many years ago!
I’m grateful for the tremendous influence and good that this community has given me over the years. It has led to a better way of eating for me, a low-carb animal based diet that combined with my DIY Loop has enabled normal blood glucose. I connected with others 9 years ago and started my DIY Loop regimen that immensely improved my diabetes quality of life. Community has given me these precious gifts!
It has given me the ability to use my writing to help others. This has given me untold satisfaction that inspires me to look for another community to enable this going forward. The need for community never stops; it’s our job to identify the place to let that flower!
Thank-you to all that I have interacted with over these many years. I hope our paths cross again!
Here’s what makes me nuts about some other forums, not that we are experts andknow everything, but there are groups where people post the most crazy idea about things, and the mods do not fix it. I was in a store one day and heard a mom tell her child, (the child saw someone testing their BG), you don’t want to be a diabetic like them. They always lose limbs and die. No joke, I see this all the time in less educated unmoderated (properly) groups. Or they have some odd symptom and attribute it to diabetes. I see the same thing in the Graves disease forum for Hyperthyroid. Sigh…..
I’m an introvert and joining any community is already a stretch for me. But the prize of genuine community is worth the effort!
The challenge is for every community is to reach out to members who need education in a kind and gentle way that might beneficially alter their trajectory and make that jump between “me” and “we” possible.
I’ve served as a mod here for about a year and learned that their job is not so easy! Good moderation of a social platform is an art. I think that the best communities are comprised of members who are willing to perform moderation “duties” even as just members.
Large doses of kindness can make this possible but it does not always happen in the two-dimensional space of writing exchanges or chat.
I’ll miss all of you.
It’s sad. This is one of the only decent formats for technical problem solving. There are plenty of single page applications already that don’t facilitate technical problem solving.
If there is a way to keep it operation, I would love to know how, @rarabt1. It’s really made a huge difference in my quality of life. I would love if there was a way to allow that resource to exist for others. Please let me know if there is anything I can do.
My contact info is also listed here, if anybody wants it. I see lots of you are posting real life photos. It’s fun to see who you actually are. Transition
I want to address the wide responses that our community has expressed in this time of transition. I’ve read about a sadness, a sense of loss, fear, anger and acceptance, all legitimate human emotions when a significant change looms large in the near future.
I wish to point out, at the risk of being seen as overly pedantic, that human groups that serve the common good also contain all the flaws of humans. Just consider the history of religions and churches. I’ve never personally identified with religion but I’ve grown to respect the basic fundamental human need that they serve. They are an overall good in our culture yet I also recognize the damage that they’ve done to the human spirit.
We need to accept that the founding of the Diabetes Hand Foundation was a good thing. Yet the community it served likely lost sight of the practical aspects of paying for the needed things (digital hosting expenses, for example) over time.
We also need to recognize that the DHF founders were never expected to be enslaved to their noble endeavor indefinitely. Manny Hernandez et al had a legitimate right to move on with their lives. The founders saw a solution to their situation in 2017 and found another diabetes nonprofit, BT1, to take DHF and its progeny, TuDiabetes, under its wing and see to the real world expenses going forward.
It’s unrealistic to expect that BT1 would do that forever. BT1 has decided to move on, as it has a right to do. That leaves us, the served community, in an untenable position. As a practical consideration, I don’t think we can quickly move in and save TuDiabetes as a community asset, yet I could be wrong! Perhaps I have moved to a position of acceptance too quickly.
For me, the most practical thing is to choose a landing place that meets my needs as well as many others in our community. FUDiabetes (even with its unfortunate moniker) offers me and many others in our community a place with familiarity and even many people who have participated in both forums over the years.
Does anyone know the reason TuDiabetes was created. For all of it early years and I think still today, its motto has been, So that no diabetic shall be alone or feel alone. We were started as a social site for diabetics.
I had wondered how much longer TuDiabetes would last and this does not really surprise me. I have been a member of this community for 14 years and a moderator/administrator for 12 maybe 13 years.
The DHF (Diabetes Hands Foundation) years were the best especially when we were still on the Ning platform. Ning provided many ways for members to connect as a group and on a personal level. We lost a lot when we transitioned to our current Discord platform. Ning wasn’t a better platform per se it was just better for us.
The dissolution of DHF was a sad day and if not for Beyond Type 1 this forum would have ceased to exist then, they saw the value in TuDiabetes and graciously agreed to sponsor this site because it was and still is a great resource. During these BT1 years TuDiabetes was allowed to continue on as it was and still is today, never changing and to its detriment never innovating.
FuDiabetes is an almost mirror site, it runs on the same platform. It was born due to a self-introduced rift on this site. The reasons are old news and I will not go into them now. When FuDiabetes was created there was great animosity between the two sites. I saw this animosity as a bad thing for both sites and worked hard to heal the rift, I feel I was mostly successful and consider them to be on par with TuDiabetes. They have the same spirit of caring that you see here, I hope to see many of you there.
I wish to thank The Diabetes Hands Foundation (wherever you are) and Beyond Type 1 for a beautiful ride.
I’m hoping to keep the site going at least a bit longer. I know social media’s insatiable hunger for our attention leaves people little time for dedicated spaces like this but a little is not nothing so I’m willing to put work into keeping the forum going. I’ve reached out to a couple of other non-profits to see if they have any interest in talking to Beyond Type 1 about hosting the forum. At less than $1500 a year I can almost afford to do it myself but it would be about $1k/year for a non-profit.
Beyond Type 1 is meeting new challenges. After their rough 2022 they reorganized and appear to be succeeding. Their forum on the Mighty Networks platform is probably better suited to their needs, costs half as much, doesn’t require moderation or maintenance. Hopefully BT1 will start engaging with members there and continues to succeed at funding research and scholarships.
I created a post of FUD that shows how we use the wayback machine to access old TUD posts so everybody knows they are there if they needed them. I hope everybody doesn’t feel so sad. We can crawl the archive.
