Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

LunaSea, the open source Usenet monitoring app is pronounced dead for the most part. The developer via a Reddit thread said this:

tl;dr: development focus has shifted to a successor to LunaSea and is slowly being worked on. No timelines at this time, as I’m working on it when I have the drive to spend time on it. LunaSea is in maintenance mode and won’t be receiving any updates unless there is a major breaking issue discovered due to one of the supported modules having a breaking change.

LunaSea was started over 5 years ago and in truth has a really poor code base. Mix of inexperience at the time with good design patterns alongside rapid feature releases has grown LunaSea to a point of being a huge time investment to make any major changes to the project.

• Mix that in with a few other things, I have lost a lot of interest in working on LunaSea. Some things include:
• A tale as old as time in the industry: major burnout. This has triggered me to spend a lot more time investing in hobbies outside of coding and my computer in general
• Getting married late last year and spending more personal time with my wife
• Planning a cross-country move later this year and preparing for that
• Taking up a higher seniority position in my professional career (also as a software engineer) which has me committing more time to my career

You also pointed out a really good fact, LunaSea does not really have any income. As it is now, donations are about equal to the infrastructure cost for maintaining LunaSea. Between donations on all the different platforms and Ko-Fi, I average approximately $40-$50/month.

It’s increasingly difficult to want to invest a lot of time into something that isn’t really garnering any financial gains. I would probably estimate at least 3,000 hours have been spent working on LunaSea, and while I am a huge proponent of open-source and free applications, and I don’t regret making LunaSea FOSS, I do wish that I had more financial gains to show for how much time was invested working on the project over the years.

All that being said, I’ve slowly been chipping away at working on a successor to LunaSea. LunaSea is no longer being worked on but I will publish a fix for any major breaking bugs if they occur. As it is now, LunaSea does have minor non-breaking bugs but is in a state where all intended functionality works, so there is no need for any updates.

The successor will remain fully open-source, but will charge for the client application when installed from a monetization-supported platform (such as the App Store, Play Store, etc.). However, free copies of the binaries (IPAs, APKs, etc.) will always be available officially.

This will be a complete rewrite that shifts to a server-client approach where the user would install/run (via Docker) a server component and the client application connects only to that. It allows me to start fresh away from all of the technical debt while having a much improved experience across the board.

However, I’ll admit I’m not overly focused on this either. I work on it when I want to, and I’m not putting any pressure on myself to meet any timelines or release in any timeframe. I really love software engineering and want to avoid burning out again.

I made the mistake of giving general timelines before regarding this project and have missed them all, so at this point I can only say it will be ready when it’s ready. Progress is still being made (albeit admittedly slowly), and I will remain monitoring feedback and giving support for LunaSea when I can.