Powercord has reached EOL

[brightghost]

Effective immediately, Powercord's active development is ceasing.

Powercord started as a small hobby project over 4 years ago. It started as aethcord, a "personal client mod" I had made. Mostly unconfigurable, didn't have any kind of third-party plugin support - the entire idea was that I made something for my own use and I didn't care about anyone else's preferences. It was as opinionated as it could be, even came bundled with my own theme. I started showing off the project in a modding server, which is where a few people picked up interest and joined my server to see what it was all about. Some unique (at the time..) features and ideas like the Spotify modal, performant injection, and Ryan Gosling lead to the existence of a small #powercord channel in my server: a small group of no more than 15 people using my client mod.

Fast forward 35.000+ users, 1.300+ stars, 1.800+ commits by 80+ contributors, and thousands of dollars in donations later.. Powercord is no longer the small project it once was. Maintaining a project this large is no easy task, especially considering the nature of client mods: having to adapt and keep up with a constantly moving target. I myself haven't had the time to work on Powercord for years, Cynthia had been leading development on her own for at least 2 years.

With neither me nor Cynthia having the time or motivation to work on Powercord, I've been relying on community members making pull requests to keep up with breaking changes. It's been an unreliable and slow process, primarily because we don't have the development resources we once had; on top of me barely having the time to review and merge these pull requests, or manage any other aspect of a product this large. In the past few weeks of me putting in the work to merge PRs, I've seen lots of community members excited to see things being merged and hopeful for the future of Powercord, but behind the scenes, I've only been merging these PRs to make sure the codebase is left in an acceptable state. Keeping up this far has been almost impossible, and it didn't take me long to realize that this wasn't viable long-term. That's why Powercord is ending. I hope this makes it clear that I didn't make this decision lightly.

Thank you for 4 years of continued support. Growing such a large community and userbase from a silly personal project has been an incredible experience, and despite things having to end, I wouldn't have wanted things any other way. Maybe the real discord client mod focused on simplicity and performance was the friends we made along the way :^)

(Doesn't really seem necessary to make everyone join a discord server to read this?)