RTV development is shutting down

[michael-lazar]

RTV development is shutting down

Hi, I'm the author and sole maintainer of RTV (https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv).

This is an official announcement that I will no longer be maintaining this project.

Why?

Lately, RTV has stopped being fun for me to work on. I suspect this is the typical burnout that many open source maintainers face. I have a limited amount of free time, and other projects that I would rather be spending it on.

More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing. I don't like how people treat each other on the platform, and I don't like how it makes me feel when I use it.

So I'm making a clean break and moving on to other things that make me happy.

What will happen to RTV?

Nothing, the GitHub repo will remain as it is today. I am simply going to stop responding to issues and pull requests. I suspect that many people will continue to use the latest release of RTV for some time, until reddit inevitably breaks their API. I may archive the repo sometime in the future.

I will retain access to the PyPI repo and will not publish any new releases. I don't have any involvement in the other package repositories. It's up to those maintainers to decide how to handle this.

I will not be offering any future security patches or bugfixes.

For those who want to continue development, I suggest that forking is the appropriate course of action. I support anyone who wants to fork this project, provided that you follow to these guidelines:

1. Change the name of your fork, so people don't confuse it with this project (fun fact, the name "Reddit Terminal Viewer" is a direct violation of reddit's usage policy).
2. Attribute RTV as the source and provide a link back to this project's GitHub repo.

Why not transfer ownership to someone else?

Frankly, I don't want to put the work into vetting a new maintainer or transferring ownership to an organization. Stuff like this scares me.

Forking is nice because it allows the new maintainer to establish their own trust and reputation within the community. It's also nice because it requires zero involvement from myself. I acknowledge that this is inconvenient for the average RTV user. Change is always annoying, especially when you have no control over it.

Thanks

I would like to say thank you to everyone who interacted positively via the issue tracker, pull requests, email, saythanks.io, reddit, and other channels. I look forward to building more things together in the future!

[goggle]

Oh, that's really sad... but I can understand you. If the project doesn't satisfy you anymore, it's the right thing to do! I've known and used rtv for many years. It was a great project! Thank you for putting all that effort in it!

Unfortunately, I've only recently started to contribute to rtv, so I have some open PRs that did not make it into that project: #684, #688 and #691. I hope that we can establish a successful fork.

[michael-lazar]

@goggle Thanks! Sorry about those PRs. It was nothing personal or a knock against your code, just bad timing.

[woorst]

@michael-lazar it's been real. Thanks for this great project

[cyberjunkie2k]

Just a user, but I am very thankful for all your work and effort. It's been an excellent project. I hate the direction popular (social and news) media has taken over the past few years, and I can relate to your frustration.

Hope you find your time better used in more productive, satisfying and gratifying things. Thanks again!

[gbpi]

Thank you for your great work. I only recently started using rtv and have been really enjoying it.

I feel like rtv makes the platform more tolerable, in a browser I would find myself endlessly scrolling /all/ and that rarely leads anywhere good. Now I just have a couple multis setup with some subs I enjoy and check in on them occasionally with rtv.

[mm-git01]

Thank you for the work you did with RTV,it was a excellent terminal based reddit tool.

As far as reddit goes,the increasing no of "normal" folks moving to reddit from sites like facebook imo is the reason for its downfall.It used to be a great community/knowledge resouce especially for hobbies and whatnot sadly with "geek/nerd is the new cool" thing destroying everything in its path,reddit too seems to have fallen.

[manskron]

I've enjoyed RTV very much. Thanks for all the work you've done on it.

[naiveai]

Thank you for the work you did with RTV! It's a great thing you've made here.

[bart-kneepkens]

Your concerns for the platform are valid. Thanks for making RTV!

[bronikowski]

Can't blame you, I really liked to have a low distraction client that runs great on RPi. Have fun with your next project!

[vor0nwe]

That’s too bad, but understandable.

Are you going to archive this repo? Makes it clearer that it’s no longer being maintained.

[goggle]

@vor0nwe He answered that question:

Nothing, the GitHub repo will remain as it is today. I am simply going to stop responding to issues and pull requests. I suspect that many people will continue to use the latest release of RTV for some time, until reddit inevitably breaks their API. I may archive the repo sometime in the future.

[rudevdr]

Its sad that the project is being shut down. But I am sure the source code will help many new comers learn many things about programming.

[michaelachrisco]

Thank you so much for your work over the years! After the redesign of reddit, I put rtv on almost all of my systems because of the clean interface.

[dessalines]

Thank you so much for your work, this is totally understandable. Who knows how long it'll be before reddit closes off their API and goes the way of twitter and FB.

For anyone else interested, I've been building a federated reddit alternative called Lemmy intended to work in the fediverse, and have an open ticket for someone to fork RTV to get a working command line client for it.