It’s incredible, how suffering I am.

But first things first, who the hell am I?

Hello. I am nao. I am the one who started Ampersand just shy of two years ago. And I’ve been developing this application ever since, with the help of some friends, and most importantly, one other person who most of you know by the nickname of Nestle.

The context

In 2023 I was discovering myself - as in plural - and with the help of Nestle, I downloaded Simply Plural. It didn’t really click with my brain, because I do have some severe skill issues it seems, so it was more like me bugging him day in and day out to be able to use this app.

But internet, where I live, was… not the best I’d say. It is now, since most stuff got updated, we got 5G and it’s a bit better now, but it wasn’t back then.

And so Simply Plural would delete my data because I inputted it offline.

I am sure most of you can relate, huh?

The beginnings

I was tasked, as part of my studies, to make functional application prototypes; that was, as I am a student in some academy, and I do user experience design both as a hobby and as… well, what I effectively want to major in.

I ended up making a presentation about plurality and “how a proper app to track switches would look like” in an exam for a subject that nobody would even dare associating with plurality. I had in hands the most “punk” project that my teacher had ever seen, and I got top grades for it.

I called that presentation “project Ampersand”.

However, after the presentation was over and I returned home, that day, a void inside myself kept expanding: I had this vision, and it was so… fun and intuitive to look at, but that night I had to be confronted with Simply Plural and the dreaded offline strip at the bottom of my phone’s display.

Despair creeped in.

Again? But Internet is working, how can such a thing be possible?

Eventually I started researching methods of making that presentation into some kind of functional application. It was for research, I would tell myself - research, nothing more.

The trouble

Eventually I set out to learn what Ampersand is currently using: Vue 3, Typescript, Rust… you name it. I had to learn those things because I wanted to make this application, as a side project, a hobby of mine. Maybe one day it’ll be functional enough that it would finally replace Simply Plural?

But life creeped in, and I got no more free time to think about Ampersand for a while. The app was left, barely even started, in my computer, waiting better days. This was the end of 2024.

I suffered life, I don’t want to make an entire excursus about it but being glad to be alive is an understatement.

The grind

At the beginnings of 2025, after an event that gave me some kind of inspiration, I started working on Ampersand again - and most of what it is was done between January and May of that year. Most importantly, it was now installable on my phone, whereas before that it could only live as a project on my computer.

I also started pitching the app to Nestle, and he got so into it he did entire parts of it when I wasn’t looking - that’s how “locked in” we were, because we truly wanted something special to come out of our hands, that would benefit ourselves.

The first roadblock

Soon enough, our naive approach was showing: the app would crash on us if we were to use it for real. We had to learn, the hard way, that making something with vibes being the only thing that drives you will only make something that’s beautiful to look at, and only that.

But we were not developers - we were nobodies. And so we tried to call for help, but eventually all we had to do was figuring out ourselves what we could do to make the application not crash.

However, we could only postpone the crash so that we could use the app, but other people probably couldn’t. This was not because we hated others, but because we weren’t tech savvy enough to properly fix things.

This is problem one of Ampersand: it tends to be slow and crash.

Continuing on the grind

Then I thought: I hope for it to at least be noticed by some proper developer, so that they may steal some ideas we have. At that point we’ll scrap this and just install some other plural tracker.

And so, we tried to at least be innovative, to think out of the box, and to design and develop new usage patterns: presence systems, influencing systems, and most importantly the shared journal.

Those are all in Ampersand today but they were conceptualized way earlier, with the former two at around August 2025.

The December chronicles

At around December 2025 we got a request to put it on the Google Play Store. We initially weren’t too much fond of that, but since we did have a developer account at Google we thought “why not? it’ll also be easier to install for ourselves” and so we did that.

At the same time, I was trying to run the Tumblr blog, because I thought it would be nice to see if someone else noticed the application.

Those two things, combined, meant an influx of people in our now-defunct first iteration of a Discord server, some place where only tech savvy people who were really into niche things were hanging out.

We weren’t prepared for that - no one could ever prepare for that.

People rushed in, demanding features we never thought of, or outright bashing us for the application being slow, or it being offline, or it being hard to use.

We got emotionally overwhelmed to the point of us having a fever that touched 40 degrees celsius at the same time, and so we weren’t able to moderate our server. When we finally came by we were still emotionally unstable, and so we tore down the place, and burned it, even. It was too much, and it showed us that we weren’t cut for this.

Not to mention, but back then someone DM’ed me personally with all the intents to cancel Simply Plural’s developer over their choice not to ban a moderator of theirs. This got me uneasy, because it was telling me that I would be the next person to get canceled - I simply didn’t know when.

But, I mean, we were two people versus an enormous influx of users. We could only end up dead.

The January sparkle

In January we tried to just forget Ampersand, or rather, to contribute to it behind closed doors. I myself was so lost I had no interest to continue it, but that didn’t stop Nestle from implementing all the cool and shiny Markdown syntax some people use and love so much.

In February we were excited to release a new version, hoping this would be well received, at least.

In March…

The March chronicles

… we tried to open a Discord server, again, but this time it had to be for testing purposes only, no community efforts because we couldn’t moderate it. We only needed people to use Ampersand, test it, report bugs, and do so in the most quick way possible, as we were planning to do a whole round of UI/UX polishing.

At the same time, I launched a poll on Tumblr to see the overall app reception.

The poll results

The poll went so badly I am even impressed Ampersand is on the device of someone else but us here. Most users criticize us on the choice of having the “role” field, which was never mandatory to fill and which I do personally use a lot.

The second thing we found out is that the perceived quality of the app is basically nonexistent, with most people having it crash and lag due to the fact that Ampersand was never optimized to begin with, but because we weren’t developers, we were two people wanting to make something cool for personal usage.

The third thing we found out was that the sentiment behind Ampersand was a “be wary of them, don’t use the app if you can” because we were labelled “anti-endo”. This eventually made me do a post clearing this up on Tumblr, but those allegations never went away.

The Discord chronicles, again

At this time we got a Discord server that was restricted because we weren’t emotionally stable nor with a suitable moderation team to open it, but we also needed feedback on the app also because we had all the intent on improving the app, in the areas where we could do that, and we also had all the intents on asking for help in the areas where we could not.

And then, sadly, as it happens, someone joins the server, they talk with others about some other applications, and in enforcing the server rules I end up being aggressive and, honestly, desperate. This was what happened with the head of a fork of Ampersand I am sure some of you know.

And the icing on the cake: SP closes shop

Since everything everywhere all at once is misfortune’s motto, the Simply Plural developer also announced yesterday that they want out of the picture. This meant unwanted visibility to Ampersand, and another wave of users that we, in all honesty, did not want.

We didn’t because our creeks were evident, we’re unsuited to deal with this amount of users and our app is unsuited to be a plural tracker.

But alas, now I got my name all tarnished, people saying I am anti-endo because I recommended Octocon to some people who searched for an online alternative, and some other people saying I am against polyfragmented systems because Ampersand crashes with tons of members.

This is too much. And I know this very blog post will only add fire to my name and Ampersand’s reputation.

But I want fresh air, I want out. This is unbearable.

I wonder if someone, at the other end of this website, ever wondered how it feels to be a hobbyist duo of developers dealing with this much visibility, those many problems, and rampant, injustified hate, all of a sudden. Wouldn’t it crush us?

Because we are crushed.

At a Crossroads

I decided to close the Tumblr blog, suspend the invite on our Discord group, and chill out. This is a hiatus, and as of now I am undecided whether to continue development, or just straight out delete this application from existence.

Why would I delete it? Those two years were honestly a pain, Ampersand has been a pain. It did bring me joy when I made things work out in the end, but developing it felt like crying in a room locked from the outside for the most part.

Me and Nestle are two hobbyists, and also emotionally vulnerable at that, and yet we only had rage and hate coming in, in the last three months. To top it all off, searching for Ampersand on the socials only brought up the obvious: people want the shiny things, but no one cares about the philosophy behind it.

We are defeated.

We cannot fix the app crashing on polyfragmented systems, and that’s a fact, as we don’t know how to do that.
We also cannot make it so that it has online features, because that’s development time and skills that we don’t have.
And lastly, we now can’t really think of a sane way to continue development, because no one ever came to support us.

And even now, we’re hurting alone while half the community says that Ampersand is not safe to use because I announced the hiatus.

—

The only thing I can confidently say is that I don’t blame Amaryllis one bit for leaving. May they have peace now.

-Nao

PS: I wrote this while crying. Please have respect of me.