Here is the official announcement from the developer, Atlas "I have made the decision to retire the Octocon project. Our servers will be fully shut down in around 2 weeks, and our CDN (to download your avatars) will be shut down at a later time. New account registrations have been disabled. I no longer have the mental capacity to work on this project. I am physically unable to continue developing Octocon given the negative impact it has on my mental health, which is only predicted to grow worse as we expand. You do not have to agree with this decision; my only ask is that people do not pry me for more information. Especially so soon after Simply Plural announced their discontinuation, I genuinely cannot put into words how sorry I am that I had to make this decision. The ability to export your data to PluralKit's format has been implemented in the (removed) bot; you can do this with the /export format:PluralKit command. This will allow you to transfer your Octocon user data to any platform that supports PluralKit's import format. You can also use /export format:Full to receive a full copy of your data, which cannot be imported elsewhere unless other platforms implement Octocon imports. Full exports will not include journal entries, as they are encrypted. For app users, you will have to wait until Google and Apple approve a new build that provides this functionality on the app-side. There is unfortunately nothing I can do about this; I will make another announcement when app-side data exports are available. In the meantime, you may export your data if you have a (removed) account linked and use the bot, but I understand this is not feasible for everyone given the controversial nature of (removed). Our servers will be shut down 2 weeks after Google and Apple approve our build with data export functionality. An announcement will be made in the future clarifying this. Why are you not transferring the project to someone else? I do not feel safe handing off our users' data to another individual, even if some of it is encrypted. With the data we handle being as sensitive as it is, I could never consider this an appropriate solution. What hope does Octocon have in the future? Octocon (both the backend and the app) is fully open-source under the extremely permissive MIT License. People are free to fork us and restart development as they wish. All I ask is that any forks are not marketed directly using Octocon's name, logo, or branding to avoid confusion. Our codebase is very complicated, and our infrastructure-specific code is deeply entangled with our actual codebase in some places. It would likely take someone with a lot of knowledge and countless hours of time to get things going. Our dev Dockerfile would be a good place to start. What about patrons? If you currently have an active Patreon subscription and would like a refund, DM me and I'll refund you for this month. If not, your funds will simply serve to shrink my deficit towards March's server bills. I cannot profit from them. My Ko-fi will be shut down soon, and further Patreon subscriptions will be closed, as I am not comfortable collecting money from our community if there is no project to fund."
ALSO, addressing the fact that ampersand was thought to be going down is this from Nestle on the amp team "Is Ampersand shutting down? What exactly do you mean by that? Are we stopping development? Are we closing down our (removed) channels? Are the app’s servers shutting down? Will you be losing your data? The answers are: No, we thought about that but we actually wanted to take a break to get away from the influx of SP refugees pestering us, and/or spreading rumors about us being (removed) people who hated [insert plural minority here]. Yes, (removed) is gone, and we’re not approving people in the (removed) server at the moment, except code contributors. This website remains the only source of truth. … Ampersand has no servers. Ampersand has never had any servers, Ampersand doesn’t have servers, and Ampersand will not have any servers. The app is offline, the data is on your phone, your members will still load even without Wi-Fi. This has always been our “marketing” since Day One (and some people hated us for it.) As I said, the data is on your phone. As long as you don’t uninstall Ampersand, don’t turn on Ampersand’s app lock and forget your password, don’t forget your device’s PIN, don’t lose your device… you’ll be fine. Just make backups.
