Retrospring is shutting down on 1st March 2025

After about ten years of providing a social Q/A experience to you, it is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of https://retrospring.net services on the 1st of March 2025.

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?

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.

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.

Until then, you will be able to download an export of all your profile information from your settings page. After the shutdown, we will try to provide an alternative and final way to download your export until 1st September 2025. More information on that will follow.

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?

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
• CuriousCat
• Marshmallow (available in japanese only)
• NGL
• Tellonym

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

Alternatively, you can always host your version of Retrospring, with the source code being publicly available. So, you're free to hack on and improve anything to your liking.

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!