Why is Retrospring shutting down?

Retrospring never was a large company, as many might have assumed. It never was a company at all. Retrospring started as a project by two friends, later having another one join, and someone leaving again. So, currently, the entire site is being taken care of by 2 people.

With service quality steadily degrading and us not being able to keep up anymore, which is turning into more and more of a liability with our current user counts, we are deciding to shut down the service.

Why don't you just get more people to work on the site then?

Retrospring always tried to be a welcoming open-source project, but we didn't manage to attract more permanent contributors to the project over time.

Can't you hand over the hosting of the site to someone else?

We could. But we won't.

Why? As per our front page, Retrospring is about privacy and keeping the data of our users safe. If we give away all that data, even to an individual we would trust at the time, we can't guarantee what's happening with the data afterward. We don't want to potentially violate that trust you've given us even in the future.

Timeline of Shutdown

From the point of this announcement until the 1st of March 2025, https://retrospring.net will show a banner to remind users of the shutdown.

(Updated, 28th September 2024) On October 1st, 2024, we will close registrations. This was planned ahead already, but due to the nature of another site shutting down, this allows us to run the service smoothly for the remaining users.

(Updated, 22nd February 2025) The site will continue to operate normally until the 1st of March 2025 at midnight (UTC+1), at which Retrospring services will become unavailable and will be replaced with a static page informing users about the shutdown. be turned into read-only mode, where only data exports can be made and accounts/contents can be deleted, not created.

You will be able to download an export of all your profile information from your settings page.

Effective immediately, we will also stop taking feature requests via Canny, as they are unlikely to be fulfilled by now. You can however still report bugs and we will look into fixing them.

Our social media accounts will still be monitored until the final 1st September 2025 date, and will not be deleted afterwards either. These accounts will also be used to communicate updates to this post:

• Twitter/X
• Mastodon/Fediverse
• Bluesky

The GitHub project and all other source code will stay available forever.

What about pledges/donations?

While we collected pledges and donations over Patreon and OpenCollective, we never withdrew any funds from either. One of the reasons is that for a long amount of time, the donations haven't been enough to cover server costs. By now, the funds collected over both services would pay for 3 months of running Retrospring, as to why we decided to keep paying out of our own pockets.

Please cancel your pledges and recurring donations, and if you can, you might even request a refund.

Anything that is still on Patreon and OpenCollective by the end of the shutdown timeline will be donated to a charity which we will announce beforehand. We will provide receipts on relevant channels after the donation has been made.

Are there any alternatives to use?

Since the shutdown announcement, people started hosting Retrospring using the open source-code themselves, two known instances are:

• Revospring
• If you host Retrospring and also want to appear on this list, feel free to reach out to us!

There also has been a re-implementation of Retrospring called Rainbeam, with it's hosted instance being known as Neospring.

If you are interested in self-hosting a single user option, a new software called CatAsk also was made.

There are a few other social Q&A websites out there. These might not offer the same feature set as Retrospring, but might be enough for some use cases:

• ask.fm (announced its shutdown and ends on 1st December, 2024)
• CuriousCat (announced its shutdown and ends on October 7th, 2024)
• Marshmallow (available in japanese only)
• NGL
• Tellonym

If any alternatives come up, this list will be updated accordingly.

The aforementioned read-only mode will enable groups like ArchiveTeam to preserve the websites history until the final shutdown date on 1st September 2025.

We're in talks with the group coordinating the archiving efforts and aid them as much as we can.

Thank you for using Retrospring since 2014! We appreciate each one of you and are humbled by everyone who decided to use our service over all this time!

Updates

• 28th September 2024: Removed CuriousCat as an alternative due to it announcing its own shutdown. Also updating our timeline with a date when we close registrations, on October 1st.
• 26th October 2024: Removed ask.fm as an alternative due to it announcing its own shutdown.
• 22nd February 2025: Adjusted shutdown info to mention the site going into read-only mode and listed more software and site alternatives.

Foreword

Before we jump into the changes, a small foreword and thank you to all our new users.

At the end of January, CuriousCat, one of the larger Q/A sites, went down for about a week. As people searched for a new home, many decided to try out Retrospring, similarly to what already has happened in December 2021.

Back in early December 2021, Retrospring was at about 2000 users and now, after the second CuriousCat outage that count has risen to about 35,000. Of course, many have returned back to CC, which as of writing this post went back online, but we're also thankful to see that many people have decided to stick around with us!

Retrospring is not a company, we are just three friends building a website we want to use ourselves, with features that we and the community want. We're not a big company with monetary incentives. Our core principles are providing a service without any ads or selling any user data.

Our old server started to struggle quite a bit when registrations were at their peak. Our server slowed down tremendously, showing everyone the now dreaded unicorn. We have since updated our servers, and with that our operating cost drastically increased as well.

Before, our monthly bills on Retrospring were around $40, the current estimation based on the new servers we have is now around $100.

A handful of people already decided to donate, and we are thankful for every single dollar received!

If you would like to help us out, you can do so on Patreon for monthly donations, or on OpenCollective for both monthly or one-time donations. OpenCollective also handily displays our budget publicly, for full transparency.

Our monthly plans currently don't offer any special benefits as we don't like to gate features behind any sort of paywall. If you have any idea what we could offer to you, feel free to drop us a mention or a question on our profiles.

Changes to sharing

After Twitter announced changes to their API on February 2nd, beginning to charge for their previously free API, we have removed our automated posting integration from Retrospring.

However, this doesn't mean that posting to Twitter is not possible at all. We have added a prompt after answering a question that allows you to more easily share your answers manually to Twitter (and Tumblr or other services).

While this isn't as handy as the automated posting, it allows you to edit the shared answer using Twitter's posting tools. Manual sharing is also not subject to the limits that Retrospring has run into quite frequently, which prevented automated posting for everyone for a few hours.

Even though Twitter reversed its course on turning the API paid (temporarily?), we have decided to still remove the integration, due to the uncertainty of us being able to provide integration features in the future.

As touched upon above, the change to manual sharing has also enabled us to add another feature: custom sharing providers! If you use a website that supports external sharing, these usually have some URL tied to it, which you can specify in the settings for it to appear in the sharing prompt.

Here is an example of two services supporting this: Mastodon and Misskey. Both support sharing from other websites using a /share?text= URL:

Pinning answers

By popular demand, we have added the ability to pin answers to the top of your profile. You can pin up to 10 answers at once.

Other changes

• When looking at your own sent questions, an icon will now appear on questions you've sent directly to others to indicate that they are not shown to everyone
• Line breaks now appear properly in questions and answers
• Added new questions to the question generator
• Made many improvements to page speed all throughout the site
• Fixed user avatars being too large for profile card on “medium-sized” screens such as tablets

The full changelog for this release can be found here

Spread the word

Use the website, share your answers and tell people about Retrospring (if you like it, of course).

You can also always talk to us on Retrospring itself, on Twitter or on the fediverse!

This doesn't seem like much, but we don't run any ads or push our service onto people, Retrospring's entire growth (now over 20,000 users) solely came from people recommending the site to others!

Coding

If you know how to code and want to help us out, go right ahead!

In case you didn't know, the entirity of the Retrospring codebase is open-source and available on GitHub for anyone to audit, read through and contribute to!

Our active team currently consists of three people which have full-time jobs on the side, so new features coming to Retrospring often depends on our free time, health and motivation.

More people helping out, even with small problems and suggestions can go a long way!

Retrospring is using Ruby on Rails as a framework, with the frontend being written in HAML (think Pug for Ruby), TypeScript and SCSS.

We have a bunch of open issues with different degrees of difficulties marked, so if you feel adventurous you can give one a shot! If any problems arise, we can help you. Once your changes have been submitted, we will review and merge them when we're happy with them.

Monetary Support

Servers cost money, and so do domains and a lot of other things required to host a website such as Retrospring.

Our costs currently average out at about $40 per month. As all team members work full-time, we can easily pay this out of our own pockets, but if our growth continues (or a certain website goes down again, or for good) we might need to scale our services up to handle more users.

Although it's not required at the moment, but if you want to show your appreciation, a small donation would go a long way, or if you want, even a long time patronage!

Patreon:
Used by creators of all sorts, a common platform for something of our scale, you can find our page here.

GitHub Sponsors:
Made available by the platform we host our code on, another option to support us either monthly, or with a one-time donation! Here's the link!

Open Collective:
Another platform for larger projects and collectives to secure funding through continuous backing or one-time donations, find it here!

So, you might ask yourself one...or two questions. “Why are you not just showing ads?” and “Why not add pro tiers to your website?”. We could do that, but we don't like ads and we also do not like putting features behind a paywall. Simple as that.

This also means there are no special benefits to anyone that chooses to support us via any of the methods above. You will have our endless gratitude, but there will be no priority issue/feature queue or other privileges.

Whatever you choose to do to support Retrospring, we are thankful for anyone using the site and enjoying their time on there!

💜

To freshen up our identity, we decided to commission the designer Kai Kwong to help us create a new brand identity, and today we can present you the results!

Without much more talk, here's our new logo:

When we approached Kai, we talked about modernising and making our brand more friendly, handing over our old logo and website as reference materials.

In the initial sketching process, Kai then presented her idea for the new logo, the cloud with the combined spring line, paying homage to the “spring” part of our name and to Formspring, which back in the day also used similar shapes in their logomark.

This same idea was incorporated in the R, causing it to look more playful and incorporate similar shapes as in the icon. We absolutely loved this idea and decided to go forward with this.

Over a month, we and Kai shared feedback and ideas, refining everything, coming to the results above. It was a breeze to work with her and we are amazed by the results (and we hope you are too!)

The most prominent change on the website will be a new font selection: Variations of Lexend replacing Lato which the site used for most of its runtime.

We will work on rolling out the new branding to the Retrospring website during the next few weeks. The favicon and mobile icons as well as our social media branding will be set in a relatively short amout of time.

The font and logo on the site will be rolled out together with a larger design adjustment in the coming months!

In the meantime you can view the new assets and our branding styleguide on GitHub.

Requested by many, and bringing us closer to features of other Q/A sites like CuriousCat, we now support blocking anonymous users!

Simply press the arrow on the right side of inbox entries and click “Block”. This will prevent any further questions from this anonymous user to reach you.

Just as with regular blocking, there is currently no UI to manage anonymous blocks at the moment, we will ship this soon in another release.

Some Notes

First of all, this feature is only available on questions asked from this release on, older questions/their users can't be blocked!

As users on Retrospring can be anonymous without accounts, circumventing anonymous blocks is relatively easy, if people know how. This might lead to anonymous blocks being more or less effective in some cases. You can keep blocking anonymous users, but if things get too much, disable anonymous questions entirely.

Alternatively, use muting to prevent specific questions to pop up in your inbox.

Once again, happy blocking!

You can now go on a profile of any user and find a “Block” (or Unblock) button in the actions dropdown!

What happens when blocking a user?

• You block that user from having any interaction with you
• This includes you interacting with that user in any form
• Any follow-relationship will be cancelled upon blocking
• However, you both will still be able to see each others posts/comments on the site

Wait, what?

Yes, once you block a user, they at the moment don't see much of a difference when visiting your profile, aside the fact that they cannot interact with you anymore.

All posts/comments are still visible to them.

We are currently doing this because Retrospring does not feature private profiles (yet) and hiding content can easily be circumvented by just logging out or using a private browser window, so it effectively does not make a difference.

At some point in the future we might hide posts from users that blocked you completely and show placeholders (how Twitter does it in threads for example) but that requires some more background work being done.

Something else that is currently missing is an interface to list all users someone is currently blocking. We'll be working on this in the near future, for now we thought it'd be nice to have the general blocking feature out of the way!

Note: This does not include blocking specific anonymous users from asking you questions, this will follow up in the future.

So there's that! A feature that we all wanted for so long, finally arriving!

Happy Blocking!

First, let's talk about what's changing in general, for the following weeks:

• The language switcher at the bottom of the page has been removed.
• If you had any non-English locale set, the site will be displayed in English regardless of your setting.
• Attempting to set the language through any means will still leave the language set to English.

So, why is this happening?

Retrospring has had translation support since 2015, and since that time, we received translations for a multitude of languages, these being:

• German
• French
• Czech
• Italian
• Japanese

(We also had Pirate English and Gangster English as some alternatives available)

Especially with the latter one, Japanese, we noticed issues after we were done localizing the interface. We received feedback from the community translators that the given translations didn't make much sense in the interface, but by that time it already was “too late”.

To explain the issue, we'll go into some finer details about the structure of the locales. Let's take the following example:

[user] answered your question

Now this is a fairly easy thing to translate, but the issue comes up if you start storing the translations in the wrong way.

If we keep the [user] part static in the interface and don't include it in the translation, we basically fix the order to always be

answered your question

after a username.

And this doesn't work in a lot of languages, especially where a subject might be present in a different part of the sentence.

Of course, this can be worked around by translators, but it isn't a particularly fun experience and it doesn't really sound natural either.

Will this not mess with the people that use Retrospring in a different language?

It might, and we are sorry for this, but we also checked our numbers and currently, out of almost 11,000 users less than 100 use Retrospring in a language different than English.

So that's why we're doing this kind of hard cut. We already removed all non-English locales and currently are in the process of reworking the English one.

Once the English locale is finished, we will a translation platform and the community will be able to help us translate Retrospring into their own languages.

We have no specific date nor timeframe for this, but once everything is ready, we will put out another announcement explaining everything!

We'll hope that this change isn't a too great inconvience for many!