@dae Thank you deeply for your hard work and your sacrifice. You have been the backbone for many students who have gone into incredible professions including lawyers and doctors. Always know your sacrifices helped to impact the world in a positive manner!
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Glad @dae is going to get better work-life balance. Thanks for everything.
What’s going to happen to AnkiMobile? Is that included in the stuff that’s being handed off (my understanding is that AnkiMobile is closed source and we weren’t able to contribute or build our own versions from source anyways)?
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Let’s hope this change is for the better..
I kinda doubt it though I think this is basically the death of Anki 
I understand that family comes first but we love Anki… I wonder if anybody would be interested in forking it and making a truly free and opensource version, the only issue with rhat is Anki sync costs money to rub
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I am just a user, but I think Anki would go in a direction of enshittification as profit and not a product quality would become a top priority.
And the only alternative for a community is to make a FORK and nothing else. The only reason why Anki is so good and popular because it’s FOSS and with AnkiHub it would be as another Quizlet.
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The whole direction of the future of Anki under AnkiHub could be seen by the fact how they locked comments on Reddit’s post with that announcement. It’s already not open and soon it would be not free.
Dae. I don’t post regularly on this forum as of late, but know that Anki had a very big part in shaping who I am today as a full-time learning medical student, as is the case with thousands if not hundreds of thousands of others. Forever grateful to you, despite our differences. Nevertheless, I would hope you be around to pull the rug from under AnkiHub, should they go rogue.
A speedier development has been a big ask for quite a while now, but your Magnum Opus should remain true to its principles. Thank you, legend!
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I would hope you be around to pull the rug from under AnkiHub, should they go rogue.
@dae can you comment on whether you could come back as the main Anki dev and undo this change, if you deemed that necessary? I’m not saying that you should come back right now, I’m asking if that’s possible at all, hypothetically.
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The definition of core code seems to be seen. Feels like it’s been left vague on purpose.
This feels like the end of the free software model. Sounds like corporate lingo used just before a price hike. Any change to the current model will definitely not be for the community’s benefit.
Past actions are robbing the peace of mind, actually.
@dae Thank you for all the years of hardwork you’ve put into this software. Feel like the control of anki should have been passed over to a foundation instead of a profit oriented company.
I sincerly hope that someone will create a fork.
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I’ve been on Anki since the noughties, a simpler time before subscriptions, everything being in the cloud etc., and have got so much value from Damien’s generosity, just hacking around on my laptop running xp and then reluctantly win7. Thanks Damien for all your hard work over the years including personal replies to the most minor issues I couldn’t figure out for myself. No wonder you’ve had enough of it but you’ve been awesome, we all owe you so much.
Anki as it is now does its job perfectly. We all know that commercial interests wreck great projects, but with a laptop, the current version and a bit of effort, people are covered for everything they could possibly want if they can free themselves from needing sync. Servers and development cost money and there’s no way round that.
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Hi Damien,
Remember when there was an Emacs version of Anki? You have made this project go a long way. Thank you so much for the time you have invested in it. I use it everyday and it’s a wonderful, useful software. I think you are making a wise decision if working on the project is hurting your well being.
Take care,
Ivan
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The intention is making money, of course. Modern corporations are money-making machines and you shouldn’t confuse the individual’s intention for the company’s.
I would like to see @AnkiHub explain who controls the company and how decisions are already made at the top-level. Most companies are quite good at shitty decision-making because the structure allows for you to not identify with their consequences.
(I want to mention that I’ve previously helped with Anking video on FSRS-5 so it’s not like I have got ill intent towards them, I’m simply stating what’s reasonable)
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I don’t know what they’ll do but it’s definitely all PR-babble. Corporates don’t write to the public to express genuine mission statements, its instead to generate as much positive discussion as possible.
@AnkiHub will do better (even if it’s mostly optics) if they get a spokesperson who talk like a human without the MBA-speak. You know, like dae.
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I appreciate the titanic effort accross the years, and also considering the fact that you dindn’t get the credit you deserve from the general public (perhaps due no showing the face and keeping everything private might have also contributed).
Anki changed my life for the better, even if I did miss used it for long, and a decade later lead me to discover SuperMemo incremental reading, which dramatically chaned my life forever.
I will be gratful for life, and I will never stop spreading the word about spaced repetition 
I shared my thoughts more in detail as a former Ankihub employee and 16-year Anki user with +7 million reps under my shoulders and long contributor to the project and community (not as intensely in recent years)
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Thank you to everyone for your kind words! 
I can certainly appreciate fear of the unknown, but I don’t think there’s any need to be terrified here. Anki was already in a good place due to previous decisions: it requires no cloud connection, has a standalone sync server, has an open data format, and is open source, which puts it in a better place compared to proprietary software.
Anki’s open source nature also disincentivises user-hostile changes, as if faith is lost in the maintainers, people will fork the code. To those advocating for an immediate fork though, I’d humbly suggest you give us a chance first.
We tried to keep the status-quo as much as possible for now. I/Ankitects have been stewarding the project up until now - we didn’t have any independent foundation in the past either.
That’s not to say a foundation has been ruled out, but not as a first step. Certainly open to discussing the pros/cons in the future.
Likewise, status quo: desktop code is open source, and AnkiWeb/AnkiMobile is not.
I’m not sure it’s fair to ask them to commit to such a thing - I never made such a promise either. Being reluctant to say “never” doesn’t mean that any plans to change exist - it’s just acknowledging the fact that circumstances or market conditions may change in the future, and keeping options open.
For what it’s worth, AnkiHub have stated both publicly and privately that they’re also committed to fair and reasonable pricing.
If we went away for a long time and planned this all out privately, people would complain things were done behind closed doors. We figured it would be better to get an announcement out sooner rather than later, and do as much of the subsequent work with community involvement as possible.
And there was some urgency - I was struggling to keep up responsibilities on my own, and being a bottleneck.
It’s unlikely to happen - I was struggling with the workload as it is, and “undoing” things just puts us back in that state.
The official announcement was cross-posted to Reddit, but we wanted to keep comments on the official post in one place. I don’t think there’s anything unreasonable about that, and people were free to create their own threads on Reddit if they wished.
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I don’t think this answers the question that was being asked. The question is, are you in a position of leadership where, if you became dissatisfied with the way things were going, you have the power to do such a move. Whether or not you’d ever do it is not what’s being asked.
As for me, I’m worried about ankihub’s boasting of “AI-powered tools” on their site. I’m worried this new leadership will be particularly susceptible to tech hype and buzzwords. I don’t mind AI features being used for addons but i really hope that doesn’t make its way to the base program.
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This is kinda off-topic, but:
Pangram is likely more accurate than GPTZero: All About False Positives in AI Detectors | Pangram Labs
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Thank you for responding to my concerns in your reply. You have made lots of very reasonable points that have put me more at ease.
However, I do think it is near inevitable that any big changes will alienate a lot of the user base and will probably result in a hard fork. Many people, myself included, use the software for many, many hours every single day. I’m personally almost entirely reliant on it for my studies and I cannot afford to fail.
I hope that AnkiHub is a good steward. I will certainly give them a chance - but I share the concerns of others about the direction they intend to take the project. Time will, of course, tell.
All that aside, thank you again for all you have done. The project has been completely life changing for me and many others, and all free of charge. I appreciate all your hidden efforts, and I hope that you are able to enjoy the extra time you will now have for your other responsibilities.
We were lucky to have you, I just hope this is not a case of not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone!
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Hello @dae,
Firstly, thank you so much for the piece of software you made and maintained (for 19y, that’s close to my age 
). I wouldn’t have been the medstudent I’m right now if it wasn’t for Anki. Know that you’ll have a place in the “thanks section” of my thesis when I come to it. And if by this change you can rest, that’s already a positive thing.
I wish you the best, you’ve done a great thing.
I’m really hopeful about the future of Anki, not because of Ankihub, but because it’s opensource and has already an incredible user base (in terms of numbers, dedication and will to help the project we all enjoy).
It’ll be alright
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I think it’s meaningless to detect AI. I have a social media account using AI to generate stuffs everyday and all the outputs pass AI detector because I used 1M token of my own writing to prompt it.
And for the base program, the first version of FSRS-rs was developed with the help of GPT-4. Maybe 80% code was translated by AI from Python to Rust. My submitted PRs to Anki also have a lot of code generated by AI. Without AI, it’s really hard to contribute to such a old and large codebase like Anki. Before the release of cursor, it took me a month to read the code of schedule module of Anki. Thanks to the current AI coding tools, now it only takes 5 minutes to figure out how to write the code in the right place.
PS: it’s off-topic so I will not reply AI-related stuffs here.
Btw, I started to use codex heavily since the last month to develop the open-spaced-repetition/srs-simulator: A fast, dual‑engine spaced‑repetition simulator for comparing schedulers, memory models, and study behaviors at scale.. Without codex, I even don’t want to start this project because developing it from scratch is bothersome.
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This is very sad news. I don’t trust the group that cannibalized free content only to lock it behind a paywall. And I certainly don’t trust them not to do it again.
I’ll be looking at how to set up my own server to sync without Ankiweb and wait for forks for Anki desktop.
I hope dae got a nice payday out of this, because you deserve it. (current) Anki is a fantastic piece of software.
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