Funkwhale is looking for new maintainers

Hi there!

It's been a while since our last blog post. Lots of things happened, in particular Funkwhale 1.0 and 1.0.1 were released, eventhough we didn't publish proper announcements on the blog, so congratulation to the community for this big milestone.

I come today with some important news that are going to impact the future of the project.

On Funkwhale development and project management

When I (Agate) started Funkwhale, five years ago, it was a personal hobby. Over the years, it has grown to become much, much more. New people joined the effort, we built a collective to support the project and work together, Funkwhale itself grew and many, many new features were implemented.

While the collective effort of our community made a lot of things possible, like keeping the documentation accurate and up-to-date, translating Funkwhale to new languages, packaging it to several platforms, integrating it with third-party projects, giving feedback on new features or developing a dedicated Android application, some tasks kept being handled almost exclusively by me.

In particular, I'm thinking about project management, development and maintenance tasks, such as:

1. Building a roadmap
2. Implementing roadmap items (new features)
3. Implementing day-to-day bugfixes and enhancements
4. Publishing new releases
5. Providing support to pod admins and users
6. Maintaining the Funkwhale infrastructure and services (servers, GitLab, Blog, Forums, etc.)
7. Maintaining and moderating open.audio
8. Communicating around the project and our blog and social media
9. Triage, answer and prioritize issues on the issue tracker

Some people helped or are still helping with those tasks but overall, it has been my responsibility to handle all of this (and possibly more).

I cannot do this anymore

As you're probably already guessing from our silence and the post title, I am not able to do this work anymore.

I won't dive too much in the details, but I had serious health issues this summer, and the dust is only starting to settle. This affected my ability to work on the project on more important scale than expected, and I haven't been able to achieve anything lately but the most basic tasks.

Initially, I thought my energy and motivation would eventually come back as they were before. They didn't, however, and I think it's time I communicate clearly about this and take a step back from my current role as a project maintainer.

We're looking for help

For the time being, I am still willing to perform some of the tasks listed above, mainly maintenance tasks like basic support, infrastructure and open.audio maintenance or critical bugfixing and releases. Everything else, I won't do anymore (I haven't in a while, anyway).

I don't want to put what we have built in danger, and I want to leave some time for new people to take over.

Me reducing my involvement in the project doesn't necessarily mean Funkwhale will die, though this implies members of the community take ownership on the unfullfilled tasks and responsibilities. I've been amazed by our collective strength in the past, and I'm quite eager to see what will happen next.

As much as possible, I'll try to help with the transition, if people have questions or need pointers. I'm not leaving the community after all ;)

Some of the development tasks can be paid, as we still have some of the NLNet funding. This could be an opportunity for you to get paid working on open-source software!

If you are willing to help with one or many of the tasks listed above, please get in touch with us on our forum, or on Matrix.

Thank you so much for reading and helping with Funkwhale <3