AnkiHub's modus operandi has been to take over communities or projects where free exchange happens and monetize/paywall them. If you've been a part of the /r/medicalschoolanki subreddit, you know exactly what I mean. It's been hollowed out completely.

In the post, AnkiHub mentions how Anki is "sacred" to them. Yet, they have had no qualms entrenching themselves into Anki's settings menu as the only third-party ever to do so. [1] I am sure more is to come. And the language used in their post almost never helps their case, especially in the pricing and OSS sections.

I understand why Damien felt he was being a bottleneck in Anki's development. This is similar to what was happening with Bram and Vim. Ultimately, the community forked and built Neovim. Gorhill had also similarly transferred uBlock, but then came back and built uBlock Origin. So the precedents are there for a successful community-run or leader-run spinoff.

Syncing is sure to become a paid feature, and access to shared decks too.

Creating a fork pointed to a hosted version of Sync Server [2], and an alternative hub where people can share decks other than AnkiWeb [3] is paramount. As well as saving and preserving all of the decks there, as they are sure to go behind a paywall.

I, and I am sure many other HNers, would be willing to support that with our time and financially.

[0] https://www.ankihub.net/about-us [1] https://github.com/ankitects/anki/pull/3232 [2] https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html [3] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks

>Absolutely. Anki’s core code will remain open source, guided by the same principles that have guided the project from the beginning.

>Anki’s core code will remain open source

Hmmmmmm. Could be benign, but... hmmmmmm...

Anki is in a very solid position to be forked if anything happens, so even if this is bad news I have faith in the larger community.

> I ended up suggesting to them that we look into gradually transitioning business operations and open source stewardship over, with provisions in place to ensure that Anki remains open source and true to the principles I’ve run it by all these years.

> This is a step back for me rather than a goodbye - I will still be involved with the project, albeit at a more sustainable level.

From AnkiHub:

> No enshittification. We’ve seen what happens when VC-backed companies acquire beloved tools. That’s not what this is. There are no investors involved, and we’re not here to extract value from something the community built together. Building in the right safeguards and processes to handle pressure without stifling necessary improvements is something we’re actively considering.

Relieved at that part where they say there are no investors involved, makes the whole thing a whole lot less risky. Good for everyone involved, and here's to many more years with Anki :)

I use it extensively in my teaching. The problem is deploying Anki on locked down networks can be difficult so I've built alternatives and hacks to let you deploy decks and school accounts, but making a full-featured web client would change all of this.

So maybe it's a good time for me to have also started one of my own that I'm temporarily calling libreSRS because I'm not sure of the new direction here.

The goal is to have a multi-user, multi-algorithm-capable, web-based system that exposes everything (especially uploading!!) to the web client.

It would be interesting to have machine learning predict these probability evolutions instead. Simply recollecting tangential knowledge improves the recollection of a non-sampled factoid, which is hard to model in a strict sense, or perhaps easy for (undiscovered) dedicated analytic models. Having good performing but relatively opaque (high parameter counts) ML models could be helpful because we can treat the high parameter count ML model as surrogate humans for memory recollection experiments and try to find low parameter count models (analytic or ML) that adequately distill the learning patterns, without having to do costly human-hour experiments on actual human brains.