Let me begin by saying I've sunk over 3 months of my life into this project, with the hope of bringing about a non-commercial, transparent, optionally anonymous alternative to reddit.
I feel like the project is finally close enough to feature complete to take a step back from development. Of course there is still a never-ending list of things to do, or be improved, but I simply cannot justify spending any additional time past what I have already invested (a quarter of a year) at my current position in life on a project which may or may not be used, while forgoing all income aside from inconsistent bug bounty payouts and (lol) runescape botting. Even if this project never sees use, I'll never view the time invested as lost. It certainly re-sharpened my dev skills after over a year of atrophy, and has directly resulted in many invaluable interactions/experiences I would not have had otherwise.
Thank you to EVERYBODY who has contributed in some way to this project.
It's honestly quite impactful emotionally to step back from daily development on a project which has been your primary concern and focus for the past quarter year year of your life, and to admit it hasn't (yet?) sustained the consistent level of use it set out to achieve. The question of 'what do I do now' is daunting, but it HAS to be something which brings in, preferably consistent, income. Realistically, my options are 1. Focus on bug bountys full time, 2. Start (seriously) looking for and applying to fulltime dev/security positions, or 3. Focus on independent, commercial ( but still open-source) work
I obviously will still use the site daily, actively post any life events, traveling, bug bounty writeups, new projects, etc, and comment/moderate. I'll probably will even still commit code fairly often, I just cannot justify the full-time hours I have put into it daily for the past several months.
I'll continue to link this site anywhere that it is relevant, and ask that (you) kindly do the same. If there comes a time in which the internet decides a site like this is needed, it will be here. If the site once again achieves a significant level of use, I'll re-prioritize development accordingly.
I've also decided to hold off on the name change until the community overwhelmingly deems it as something which should happen.
Thank you again to EVERYBODY who has contributed in any way to this project. Whether that be code, moderation, or posts/comments/votes. I love you all, even
https://ieddit.com/u/adolf-hitler/ who was the only person I had to ban for the first 2 months of this project. You all have been great <3
i'll try and improve that today
Thanks for that. As of now, while things are being updated, I'm not going to worry too much about keeping the translation text current. Once the ui is stable, it will be easy to translate any new/modified words, and consciously make the ui laguage-adaptable (for example element lengths for words in some languages are way longer, but this can be planned for in advance.
I was updating the translation file a few weeks ago, I really liked some of your translations, I even updated some of the English words to reflect yours.
If I start anew I'd want to have a finish project to launch this time. A large amount of the code can be re-used, and I wrote several pip mini-libraries specifically for this site to meet shortcomings (that I've also been neglecting...). Incorporate a non-profit organization to run the site under officially, modernize the styling, and re-write probably 10% of the code. Basically things I wish I had done originally. Slap a fresh coat of paint on things, and ensure the proper corporate structures are in place to secure a some sort of ethical funding model.
The main issue is I have significantly more stress and obligations at this point in my life than I've had previously, which makes it hard to justify working on a project that will probably not see significant use.
Things have also been complicated by the recent political censorship that is happening across the internet. This site originally had a GREAT userbase, but I feel like now the demographics of people searching for an "alternative platform" would drown out the site and turn it into something unpleasant.
Who knows. At minimum I'll need to get around to improving my pip libraries with changes people have suggested on github, and maybe then I can go a bit further.
And yeah, it's insane the time has passed. I check in every so often to make sure the database/webserver is still running. Like today when the server provider suspended the account after the cloud balance ran out lol