Riddim Community ?

Since 2002 I'm an active member of the Versionist website, at begin I was only sending my tracks but since 1 or 2 years I'm too an active user of the forum. Using this website I had met virtually a lot of fantastic reggae-dub producer from around the whole world, and the Murcia gathering was the ultimate experience for me.

The history of Versionist is really complicated cause the website was owned by different people. At the begin, the creator of Versionist was a musician and a pure reggae lover that was happy to give to worldwide reggae musician a nice platform to exchange music, ideas, ...

Today it's a bit different, Versionist was bought by someone that enjoy reggae music but that don't want only host the website for the community, he do that too for commercial purpose cause he had bought and invested money in the Versionist website. The owner isn't active inside the community making a separation between him and the members.

This wasn't a problem until the website was running with same features, but today the website is moving to an other platform, fortunately the owner asked to members what they think about different possible platform, and some constructive debate occured to find best platform.

Now the community start splitting, cause it's seems that the Versionist website going to contain some paying service to enable member host track and use bandwidth. The main power of the old platform was to enable anyone to upload full song without restriction, and some members (including me) don't want to loose that.

Due to this difference of opinion, I first made a demo website to show to all that the community can run himself the platform, and few days ago my friend Irish Moss started a new community called Reggae Dubwise to give members the choice.

Both community are based on the same platform with some minor technical difference, but the main difference come from a philosophical point of view (way of managing/owning the community) and the way both websites going to earn money.

So where is my family ?
I don't want to loose friends/relationships during this migration ...

I think lot of members from Versionist would agree with Irish Moss and let it run the community the way he build Reggae Dubwise, but the fact is that it's impossible for us (the community) to buy the domain name due to his expensive price.

Seems we need to be ready to change our community name, and Irish Moss's Reggae Dubwise initiative sounds good to me (nuff respect to him for this fantastic initiative, he had spend time and money to start this really powerful website).

By the way both websites can run in parallel, concurrence is good in industry, hope it's going to be the case for online community.

Thinking about gathering, I just ask myself why we call them using a website name ... why not calling them 'Online Reggae Dub Community Gathering' (or another name that don't rely to any organization/website), going to be simpler for everyone, and as far as I know the online reggae dub community isn't split we are all sharing same interests.