Preview of changes to Identi.ca

My previous blog post on changes in the status.net service caused some worry among some identi.ca users. I'd like to reassure users that identi.ca will continue to run.

Changes are coming, although not as fast as I'd hoped. Here's my rough chronology for the next few weeks.

• I need to finish the 0.2.0 release of pump.io . This is taking longer than I hoped, but that's the way it goes over the holidays.
• Once it's released, I'll make a few sites available running the software. I think there are some other people chomping at the bit to run it, too, so there should be lots of opportunity to get onto the new system.
• After there are new pump.io sites, new user registration will be shut down on identi.ca, and I'll direct new users to one of the new pump.io sites.
• I will spend some amount of time porting the data from the Identi.ca MySQL database to a NoSQL database (I'm considering MongoDB and Couchbase, since pump.io supports both. Your opinion welcome.)
• All accounts will be backed up and made available for download (actually, you can do this now, but the new backups will be offline on archive.org and available forever.)
• Only accounts that have been active in the last year will be ported to the new database. That's about 20% of all accounts on identi.ca. Older accounts will be backed up but not ported.

Don't panic. It's gonna be OK. This is a process of months and not days. I'll have more detailed dates once I know them; but I'll definitely make sure that people have time to make choices.

If you're worried right now, make a backup of your identi.ca account. Even better, set up a StatusNet site on your own servers and start using it.

Finally: the future of the StatusNet codebase is really exciting; it's not at all "abandonware" and I'll have good news to share once the 0.2.0 version of pump.io is out.