When a popular, free and open source passion project led by a single dev moves into the hands of a company that needs to sustain its 30-people team [0], you know what happens next.

AnkiHub's modus operandi has been to take over communities or projects where free exchange happens and monetize/paywall them. If you've been a part of the /r/medicalschoolanki subreddit, you know exactly what I mean. It's been hollowed out completely.

In the post, AnkiHub mentions how Anki is "sacred" to them. Yet, they have had no qualms entrenching themselves into Anki's settings menu as the only third-party ever to do so. [1] I am sure more is to come. And the language used in their post almost never helps their case, especially in the pricing and OSS sections.

I understand why Damien felt he was being a bottleneck in Anki's development. This is similar to what was happening with Bram and Vim. Ultimately, the community forked and built Neovim. Gorhill had also similarly transferred uBlock, but then came back and built uBlock Origin. So the precedents are there for a successful community-run or leader-run spinoff.

Syncing is sure to become a paid feature, and access to shared decks too.

Creating a fork pointed to a hosted version of Sync Server [2], and an alternative hub where people can share decks other than AnkiWeb [3] is paramount. As well as saving and preserving all of the decks there, as they are sure to go behind a paywall.

I, and I am sure many other HNers, would be willing to support that with our time and financially.

[0] https://www.ankihub.net/about-us [1] https://github.com/ankitects/anki/pull/3232 [2] https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html [3] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks

This is the correct take. It's over for Anki. Even assuming a best case scenario where the status quo remains and AnkiWeb continues to be "free", all the valuable data collected in AnkiWeb is now ripe for paywalling & potential abuse. The AnkiWeb privacy policy is likely to undergo a change quite soon - https://ankiweb.net/account/privacy

A really disappointing development all around & I hope it galvanizes the community to fully disassociate itself from AnkiHub & dae.

I'm hopeful this new company wont ruin anki, but assuming they do, how do I find the "new anki" fork and how do I contribute.

Is there a community / anki forum that hasn't been acquired?

Personally what I did is pop over to the Anki github repo and star it. You can also get notifications.

One thing I notice is that it does seem to have a large group of contributors. It's hard to imagine the desktop app will die completely.

What a coincidence to see this here - in these days I'm making my first NES emulator and I have your 6502 instruction set page permanently open.

Thank you so much for your work.

For anyone curious what the buses look like: https://maps.app.goo.gl/nQd4EupFcdDBcXaw9

yep those are the ones

Thank you for the recommendations, I have now gotten the books you recommended and I will be going through them.

Thank you, I appreciate your view. What you said about my "projects" makes perfect sense. My projects are likely not focused enough, and some are definitely upside down. I am currently going through the articles you have sent. Thanks again!

Thank you for the tip, really appreciate it. I do think in the long run, the best way to use my "generalist" powers would be to do something where I am forced to know a bit of everything like entrepreneurship or content creation. That's likely where I need to turn to.

Hi Adam, thank you for your comment. Comments like yours are exactly the reason why I chose to talk about this in a public forum, so that I could get an external point of view.

Sometimes going on a while without talking about things to people can get you in an internal feedback loop where you lose touch with reality. Your point of view is refreshing to see -- it just so happens I love messing around with LaTeX, and I did think of that, just never made it happen. I will. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of benefit these little 'self-books' will bring. Thank you!

Ok great :-) I'd love to see what you produce!

Thank you. :)

I have now gotten both books and I will read them. I appreciate the recommendations.

I definitely agree getting an evaluation can't hurt, and the sooner the better. It could save me years of blaming myself for just the way my brain is wired. Thank you for sharing your experiences with me.

Thank you for sharing your experience. I do live with my partner as well, but we never 'seriously' tried something like this, where we keep each other accountable. This looks like it might help. Whenever I start something new, I should make it so that others know it so that I'm accontable. Thank you!