What's been happening is that the people who are managing Tribe now have focused a lot of time and money on getting the hardware back to operational (I'm friends with some of them so I got to hear the story as equipment got bought and installed). The place was a mess, with a tremendous amount of malfunctioning equipment and problems with the software (which are harder to fix than replacing the expensive hardware). It almost folded in November when ad revenue disappeared and there was all that Oct/Nov down time. The new management stepped in somewhere after that- they weren't involved in the old downtime.

At this point they've got a solid plan, and are putting the pieces back together.

The next step, which I dont think we'll see the results of for another year, is to re-write the software and give us a totally new format of Tribe with modern features. In the meantime they're working on some little changes, still working on the hardware issues and are slowly modernizing the equipment that needs it, are much more responsive to user complaints/bugs/problems than previous management ever was, and are able to deal with bugs as they come up. They can't drastically change the current software at this time, for a large number of technical and business agreement reasons unfortunately.

These folks really have good heads on their shoulders, though, are very much from the kinds of alternative communities that Tribe spawned/was part of in the past, and have a ton of business experience, so I think that what they're planning is really going to work well.

Personally I think that people will get tired of Facebook one-liner updates and Tribe doesn't really 'compete' with that kind of social networking because it's still primarily about 'real' content, with many kinds of discussions about many kinds of interests all in one place. Just hang in there for a while, I think it'll come back in a big way once all site operation is stable, which is just a matter of replacing all the flakey hardware- something that they've done a lot of already.