No users - no launch. I have many conversations with potential users though... I'm 100% positive this is something that people want. E.g. right now the way they solve the problem of collaborating on flashcards is by using _google sheets_ to collect errata on shared decks. https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/f0bj27/o... This workflow involves manually checking the sheets link, downloading it, converting it to the correct format, importing it into your collection, and hope it doesn't override/corrupt your own customizations to a particular card. It's absolutely fucking nuts.
I'm 100% sure it (or something like it) is desperately needed by the world. However, students aren't really well known for paying for software, so this remains a nights/weekends thing.
Great question. I've thought hard about this. I originally built it to be online-first, thinking "you can add offline support later". This is the version that's demoed in the video on the Github - and is over a year old at this point. I abandoned this for multiple reasons:
1. Adding offline support is very nontrivial. It (may) influence your choice of DB and your data schema. This is a type of master-master replication, since the user is the master of their data, and this is quite painful in RDBMS-land. I'm avoiding having to migrate my schema to support offline sync.
2. There already exist solutions that are online-first. E.g. Quizlet, mochi.cards, remnote. I find all their tools for collaboration lacking, despite being online-first... which is surprising. They don't even support something as basic as commenting on a card. This blows my mind. Imagine Github without issues/discussions/pull requests.
3. Users have repeatedly told me that they prefer offline-first. This is probably due to them coming from Anki - a popular open source offline-first program. Anki is my real "competition" - not billion-dollar Quizlet.
Also - hi, it's you! If you're willing to talk shop, you can reach me at my HN handle at gmail.com. Primarily, I'm curious why no one else is building what I am - Github for flashcards. I've met someone who's trying to build Wikipedia for flashcards... but for me personally I'm more interested in something more decentralized. Not like crypto-decentralized, but like "everyone can have their own card/definition of 'Proteus Syndrome'" - i.e. they don't defer to a central authority. I'd love to pick your brain :) No pressure, just an open invitation! My comment here [1] is still accurate:
> If there's only one thing you know about me, it should be that I want Spaced Repetition to become popular. I don't care who makes it popular - it simply needs to be popular. I'll happily talk shop with anyone building a tools-for-thought system and tell you all I've learned.
