cvwright said in #circles:matrix.org:
Hi all - Sad news today in Circles land.
As you may know, Circles has been a project of FUTO since I joined the company in early 2022. For the past 2.5 years we have been pushing toward a big public launch of the app along with a paid subscription service for accounts.
Unfortunately it was determined that this will not be feasible. The remaining work required to build the current app into a viable mass-market commercial product is simply much more than the team can handle in the remaining time available. So instead, FUTO has handed the codebase back to the development team. Source code for the app has been transferred to https://github.com/circles-project, where Circles will live on as a community open source project under the leadership of the current development team. The license has also been changed, from the (fairly restrictive) AGPL 3.0 to the extremely liberal Apache License 2.0, in order to encourage and facilitate contributions from the community.
In the days and weeks ahead, we will also be transferring the project web page, the Google Play Store app, and the Apple App Store app to the new ownership. The Circles app in the main f-droid.org repository will stay where it is, but will be updated to remove its current FUTO branding. The Circles app in FUTO's own F-Droid repo will be removed.
For those of you with accounts on the circles.futo.org servers, and for the handful of you still on circu.li, FUTO has committed to keeping those servers online through the end of 2024. In the meantime, registration of new accounts has been disabled since yesterday. A future build of the app will include an in-app message for those on the affected systems. The dev team hopes to be able to provide a hosted service again in the near future, for those users who are new to Matrix and need an account to use the app; please be patient as this will likely take us a few weeks to sort out.
FUTO has generously committed to supporting the Circles development team for the next few months. By the end of August, we hope to have the app in good shape with everything that it needs, so that it is ready if necessary to enter a sort of maintenance phase. At that point, we will have the app that I originally set out to build in early 2020. Remaining developments include:
- A new professionally-designed visual appearance
- Simplification of the way we organize circles - No more need to put everyone you follow into a circle
- Direct messages / Regular Matrix chat
Thanks to all of you here in the @room for your feedback and encouragement as we built this thing. Thanks to FUTO for their generous support over the past 2.5 years, and for allowing us to keep the app alive going forward.
tldr - FUTO Circles is dead. Long live Circles.