I love misinfo.

I also love people who don’t read and don’t understand, but I especially love people who spread false rumors on purpose.

I’m here to clear things up, but you’ll have to promise me you’ll be bringing your reading and critital thinking skills.

Is Ampersand shutting down?

What exactly do you mean by that? Are we stopping development? Are we closing down our social media channels? Are the app’s servers shutting down? Will you be losing your data?

The answers are:

1. No, we thought about that but we actually wanted to take a break to get away from the influx of SP refugees pestering us, and/or spreading rumors about us being shitty people who hated [insert plural minority here].
2. Yes, Tumblr is gone, and we’re not approving people in the Discord server at the moment, except code contributors. This website remains the only source of truth.
3. … Ampersand has no servers. Ampersand has never had any servers, Ampersand doesn’t have servers, and Ampersand will not have any servers. The app is offline, the data is on your phone, your members will still load even without Wi-Fi. This has always been our “marketing” since Day One (and some people hated us for it.)
4. As I said, the data is on your phone. As long as you don’t uninstall Ampersand, don’t turn on Ampersand’s app lock and forget your password, don’t forget your device’s PIN, don’t lose your device, don’t let the younger sibling who loves breaking things break your device, don’t let your device’s battery become a spicy pillow and then explode, don’t slap your device and call it a bad boy, don’t have intimate affairs with your device… you’ll be fine. Just make backups.

Did Nao step away from Ampersand?

No. A quick look on our Codeberg repo’s commit history should tell you Nao is still pushing updates to the app. Only thing that’s changed is I’m now managing the Discord server.

Did the Ampersand developers get bought by Octocon, along with Simply Plural? Is this a big conspiracy pushed by Big Psych to oppress every non-traumagenic system?

Nope, we don’t remember getting paid by Octocon.

That rumor came up because we suggested Octocon as a viable alternative due to the stress put on by people who wanted us to have online features (namely friends/social networking) in our app, which is offline by design.

We would still stand by that recommendation if Octocon were still with us today, by the way - Octocon was stable, performant and built around online features, but The Community Is Entitled and We Can’t Have Nice Things.

The second question… There’s no conspiracy, but let me say something you won’t like: don’t be surprised if tomorrow another plural tool developer decides to give up on their project due to repeated stress and strain caused by this “community”, don’t go around saying it’s the endos’ fault because they want to sabotage every “true system“‘s healing journey / it’s the anti-endos’ fault because they’re in cahoots with the “big scary doctors” who want to genocide every system by force-integrating them because they don’t like anything that doesn’t act, talk or walk like a singlet, or other conspiracies that make flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers look normal.

Just accept that y’all don’t even deserve the time of any developer to develop apps like this, if this is how you treat them.

PS: Octocon’s dev has stated multiple times that he doesn’t discriminate against any kind of system.

Did Simply Plural imports stop working because a ton of users were migrating to Ampersand?

No. We do not rely on SP’s API (tokens). A heightened load on Simply Plural’s servers only affects Ampersand’s ability to import avatars; everything else is taken from the export.json file you provided and imported offline. Ampersand’s servers are not getting hammered as Ampersand doesn’t have any servers.

Though, importing from Simply Plural was never battle-tested. All the code was tested on our personal imports. We couldn’t account for every edge case that comes with different imports.

We’re trying to fix those, but our import feature will never be perfect, and as such we heavily recommend anyone to start from scratch or import from other services, as they’ve got less quirks.

Is Ampersand implementing a friends feature?

No.

There have been talks about people wanting to contribute a friends feature to Ampersand, but we officially never gave any clearance on this, nor did we have actual code mailed to us for this purpose.

We’re not planning on any friends features developed by ourselves.

Does Ampersand require beefy hardware to run? Does it have a member cap? Was it artifically implemented to be ableist against polyfragmented systems?

These are our requirements. If your toaster supports this, then it can run Ampersand. The problem is the more members Ampersand has to deal with, the slower and laggier it gets. Think of it as every member is a 1kg weight. 20 people are 20kg, 75 members are 75kg and so on. Your device has to lift these weights, if it’s strong (= has powerful hardware) it can lift more with less problems, otherwise it’s going to struggle. This is why you’ve seen some people having no problems with 120 members, but others having problems at 50. There is no set cap.

This is unreasonable, but again, we did not battle-test the app to deal with polyfragmented systems. This isn’t because we’re mean or ableist, but because we tested the app on our two systems, which are small. The app worked for us so we didn’t see these problems.

We’ve had recent contributions from our community which should ameliorate the problem, but only a database rewrite could hopefully address this problem.

Does archiving members make the app faster?

No. All it does is change to a member’s archived: false attribute to archived: true and will only hide it from your member list if you’ve got @archived:no in your default member query in App Settings. Please don’t archive members for this reason alone.

Is Ampersand exclusionary to iOS users?

No, it’s Apple that requires us to pay a $100 yearly subscription to put and keep the app on the App Store. Go complain to Apple.

“But SP and Octocon did pay the subscription.” Ok, cool. I want to pay rent first.

Is Ampersand pro-endo or anti-endo?

We’re pro-touching grass and pro-recovery from social media addiction.

Seriously, the more you ask this question, the more time we’ve got to take off from our development schedule to come up with the most deliberately passive-aggressive (but neutral) answer to give you.

We are not interested in answering this question at all, so do us two favors: stop asking, and don’t ever put words in our mouth regarding this issue.