For a while now, I’ve been considering running my own RSS aggregator … for a couple of reasons (that don’t matter here). In my shortlist were two popular candidates: Tiny Tiny RSS (ttrss) and FreshRSS. Due to lack of time and other priorites, I had not made a decision, which one to follow ..
The End of tt-rss
And then, just recently, I saw that the maintainer of ttrss decided to step back — no longer motivated to continue the project.
The reasons for this are many but the tl;dr is that I no longer find it fun to maintain public-facing anything, be it open source projects or websites. As for tt-rss specifically, it has been ‘done’ for years now and the “let’s bump base PHP version and fix breakages” routine is not engaging in the slightest.
The end of tt-rss.org – Announcements – Tiny Tiny RSS: Community
I shared a brief update about this on Mastodon where I pointed out this news. Mainly to express being happy that my options narrowed down to .. one. Which makes decisions a bit easier.
The Community Reacts
What happened next was both surprising and cool: I received an answer to my post that a former contributor has forked the project and appears motivated to carry it forward. Well, this is what OpenSource makes possible! Any proprietrary Software would be dead due to licencing.
At the same time, FreshRSS responded, too. They shared a post on their GitHub discussions, preparing their active users for the arrival of new users migrating from ttrss, politely encouraging everyone to welcome them: Let’s warm welcome the TTRSS users switching over to FreshRSS as an alternative · FreshRSS/FreshRSS · Discussion #8064 · GitHub
Be friendly and let them welcome here 🙂
Discussion #8064 · GitHub
All of this is just awesome to see! The speed of reactions tells me a lot about the strength of open-source communities: a fork emerging so quickly, FreshRSS stepping up proactively, and most importantly, the very kind invitation for the community to be open and supportive to newcomers.
This is how projects thrive — not (just) because of code, but because of people and kindness and the will for building better tools together.
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