Indeed. I would like to believe I have, over a decade and different aliases, shared my “single grain of sand” to the “big desert” that is Anki has been. That be translations, community support, sharing my own templates/tools free of charge/super-permissive licensing, if at all. I would like to reinforce that I sill want to have faith on dae’s choice (regardless of his personal reasons to take a step back, which are more than understandable and one could have expected to even have taken some time back but still kept strong).
I wouldn’t mind at all them, or anyone, repackaging and selling for money any of my non.licensed stuff. That’s why it’s unlicensed at first! Them posting a first throught comment was a good lead, but for this to actually be a discussion thread of some sort, there needs to also be some involvement on their end. By the time they take to actually address any of the points that, mind you, we were redirected here to discuss, they will crash the forum with the length of their response.
Whatever the ongoing approach is to be, it would be really appreciated if you could be fully honest with your answers. Do you know? don’t yet know? that’s fine, But any kind of interaction, at all, would be way better than silence. That will allow the community to pick their choice with enoguh context from the actual source, or else it may be picked regardless.
Hey, so that was actually done before all this became a thing. We had a discussion on a different thread about this and people agreed there can be a system in place that allows better integration with popular third-party services.
Now it would be the start of enshittification if AnkiCollab and other competitors are prevented from being integrated into Anki and AnkiHub is shoved down our throat.
This sounds awful. I am very doubtful. I have used anki daily for over a decade. It is a tool. I am not interested in making easier for new users. It is a tool. I like the interface the way it is. I don’t care about it being pretty. It is a tool. Nothing that ankihub mentions interests me in the least and the whole discussion of “improvement” seems wrong headed. I hope that something usable remains. Even with the best of intentions by ankihub, this looks like the end of our beloved anki.
You mentioned “It is a tool” 3 times. Let’s put aside that that’s excessive and ask ourselves: If a tool could be designed that is just as powerful as the original design but is easier to use, should we maybe design such an upgraded tool? I’d say yes.
I don’t know how well Anki will be maintained and developed under the new leadership. But @abdo (@abdnh on github) is part of AnkiHub according to https://www.ankihub.net/about-us and already helps (and helped) a lot in reviewing, programming and merging changes into Anki (and other things as well like helping on the forums). If the AnkiHub team does a similar great job like abdo did, then we’ll probably be fine.
I myself as a volunteer have been quite active in the Anki community as well. I provided translations, updated ankis documentation (not just for the program but also FAQs, addons, ect.), help with reviewing PRs, programmed a few easier PRs myself and answered a lot of user questions. I have a big interest in Anki staying true to it’s current philosophy and will support AnkiHub or, if it should ever be neccessary, a fork of Anki to make sure Ankis current values are held high.
And I’m not the only one in the community that thinks that way. So: at least for now, let’s give AnkiHub a chance (while keeping an eye on their influence) and only do more drastic meassures (like forking Anki) if it needs to be done.
(That being said, I too, am a bit sceptical. But time will tell.)
I agree completely with what you said. I want it to remain useful. As for giving ankihub a chance, what am I going to do? Give up anki? I’d go into total withdrawal.
I’m just full of FUD today.
So often I have stood there flummoxed in a state of tartlement!
dang, last time I checked (~2018) Memrise merely hid away the shared decks section, now i found that they actually nuked it
and here I thought that memrise was slop but not nearly as slop as duolingo and quizlet. Venture Capital and its consequences have been a disaster for human society
The possibility of a hard fork is a reassuring thought; it is one of the most vital safeguards of the free software movement. While my own contributions to Anki have been purely financial rather than the labor-intensive coding of others, looking back at my twelve-year usage log today has left me surprisingly emotional.
In over a decade of data, I see only two significant gaps—brief windows where I took a few months off. Those weren’t moments of burnout, but moments of triumph. They were the points where I reached a level of fluency in a new language that allowed me to set the cards aside and simply lose myself in novels.
Anki has genuinely changed my life. It has granted me high-level literacy in two world languages and opened the door to several more. My world is vastly larger because of this tool. I realize that in the digital age, nothing is permanent, but I hope the future of this project remains bright. I have seen too many great tools succumb to “feature creep” or corporate buyouts to take what we have for granted.
Given that I got to interact with Damien, Andrew, Nicholas, and most of all David, I feel quite confident and I wish you the best of luck.
I’ve seen over the years the number of complaints about iOS being sold instead of free. When I crowdfunded and add-on, how badly received it was to ask money for my work. I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now so I first and foremost want to offer my support.
A lot of people here have spent long time volunteering, if you were in for the money, I’ve no doubt you’d have found more lucrative path. I’m certain that you have anki wellbeing at hearth, even if we may disagree on details on what’s the best path forward.
I’ve been very happy with anki of course. As a dev, I’ve also seen how often the review of PR could be a huge bottleneck, and I’ve seen how anking is able to actually bring people together. From the development perspective, I’m excited by the evolution I can imagine. (No offense meant to dae here, I perfectly understand my PRs were not your priorities, even if they were important to me)
I hope the critique won’t be self-fulfilling prophecies. Even if, in your shoes, I can’t imagine how I’d work when they are so virulent and a lot of them assuming bad-faith. Actually, while I first read the news very happy, they succeeded in putting dubts in me. If ever new code were stopping to be under GPL (I know you can, since contributors accepted a BSD 3-clause licence), then I guess it’d be a good opportunity to actually join a team on a fork. But I hope very strongly that I’ll never get to do this, and we can continue to improve anki together, but faster!
I also want to echo most peoples sentiments in saying thanks so much For this incredible application @dae and all the effort and years you have selflessly put into it. I hope you enjoy a well deserved break.
I think i disagree with others in that while I dk see Ankihub and thw Anking primarily as a business, whos primary aim is to make as much money as possible. They have not been overly money hungry - they have offered a very generous scholarship service that I and many if my friends have benefited from. I do trust that they will be faithful stewards dor the foreseeable future.
It is however after the foreseeable future that is kind of worrying. What happens when the Anking (Nicholas) takes a step back from ankihub to focus more on Dermatology or some other project. What happens if Ankihub as a whole gets sold to private equity. Etc…
I do agree that Ankihub taking over is a wise decision given the resources and strength they have at their disposal. HOWEVER!!! I feel that peoples sentiments in keeping other major Anki developers is a fantastic idea - either through a legalistic foundation or some other measure to give prominent anki developers a ’Veto’ power.
This prevents simple things from happening i.e. Ankihub being deeply embedded within Anki but other add ons having to jump through many hoops. (Yes i am aware of the prior discussion and contentions that occurred before coming to a decision to embed a third party services tab in anki preferences)
What i ask is simple. There is more then a handful of individuals who have shown themselves to be supportive and faithful in Anki and have contributed alot to the source code. People like @Shigeyuki@David@Danika_Dakika@L.M.Sherlock@Expertium@glutanimate and even @AnKingMed and @dae . Im sure j have missed many others who have given so much to the community.
Would this be something that is possible? Creating a permanent ‘board’ of prominent Anki developers who have veto power or even ‘shares’ in anki. Although this may come at the cost of slowing development , i do think the vast community will feel more at ease with this. And perhaps it can just be a veto power, meaning ankihub can still be at the helm of things and control progress?
i do want to digress and say the Ankings contributions to the community should be acknowledged and thanked. Even if he has made a successful business model of unifying others underlying work - it does not seem that they are raking it in but seem to ibe using the money to fund more and more development and increase accessibility to the decks overall.
I understand and respect the decision that has been made, sadly this looks like they will have a subscription fee for syncing which was free since inception .
Kind of interesting though that it was locked on an open forum like reddit, where it should have the most number of ‘regular’ users.
Well, that’s what it seems like. I’m not totally sure though if it’s a done and dusted matter or an angoing process. Probably later. And probably at the point of no return.
Absolutely horrible choice. Nobody in the community likes this. If it was a non-profit, maybe, but a for-profit cooperation? We beg of you, go back on this deal. It’s less about you staying on than them staying off.
@AnkiHub, welcome! Will you be managing the GitHub repository from now on? It
would be helpful to know who will be responsible for reviewing and
merging pull requests, making releases, etc.
I work at Ajatt-Tools, a collection of software projects designed to aid language learning, with the goal of uniting all language-learning-related software projects in the world in one place under one organization.
Ajatt-Tools has developed several Anki add-ons. The biggest challenge we’ve faced is add-on breakage after Anki updates. Over the years, I’ve developed significant anxiety whenever I would hear about a new version of Anki because it would almost always mean bad news. Every time I would have to read the release notes and check everything for potential issues. Often, a new version of Anki would require me to fix our add-ons to ensure they’re compatible. I dread the thought of fixing add-ons instead of creating something new, and I hope that Anki will be more stable in the future.
In the past five to seven years, we’ve seen attempts to replace working parts of Anki with new components that are barely functional, consume excessive system resources, waste screen space, and compromise usability. This shittification has primarily affected the user interfaces. For instance, the Deck Options dialog was replaced with a web-based interface built on shitty web technology. It’s so inconvenient that the only way to use it is in fullscreen mode, and you have to wait until the UI draws itself. I hope these mistakes can be rectified by moving towards Qt widgets (native UI) instead of relying on web trash. Anki has considerable technical debt, and addressing it will require removing Svelte, Rust, TypeScript, and maybe also Python from the codebase, which is a difficult task.
As a user and non devloper I think the deck options are much better now than they were before, at least on AnkiDroid. I basically didn’t touch the screen before this change due to its complexity. Before/after:
Hi Arthur, I’d like to take the chance to also acknowledge your contributions. I know you did quite a lot in the main codebase, and the niche add-ons that catered only to power users were especially valuable to me. I only supported you with coffee money as I was a PhD student with no grant at that time.
You all need to take a deep breath and at least wait until there is something concrete to be upset about. This is a major shift, yes, but it is not the doom scenario some of you are making it out to be right now.
Abdo has been on the AnkiHub payroll for as long as I can remember and is still one of the very few people with merge rights in the main Anki repo. That did not suddenly compromise Anki. David has been a strong open-source defender for years and now gets to work on Anki full time. That is a win for the community, too.
From what I understand, the AnkiDroid maintainer team is largely on board with this as well.
Please do not drag AnkiCollab into this. So far they have not attacked me in any way. Quite the opposite, actually. They have supported the project since the beginning.
So yes, have some faith. Hold your fire until there is an actual reason to be upset
.