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by Aurornis 61 days ago
The maker people I know have been migrating away from Tindie because it has felt like a sinking ship for a long time.

I really like the idea of Tindie so I hope they can succeed. I don’t understand what sequence of events led to this being such a large problem that they can’t even keep their site online. The post says something vague about the engineering team is hoping the migration work is close to finished, but it’s been years since I remember any engineering team knocking out the entire site for days without being able to restore it during a failed migration. Are they outsourcing dev work to the type of agency that bills by the hour and perpetually churns low hourly cost work to make their money in volume fixing their own code?
3 comments
starkparker 61 days ago
> The maker people I know have been migrating away from Tindie

To what? The only alternative I know of is Lectronz.

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kennywinker 61 days ago
Shopify, etsy, crowdsupply, a custom website. All have their problems, i’m not endorsing. I sell on tindie. Well, i don’t sell much there, but i list on tindie. Most of my sales come thru my own store site.
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serf 61 days ago
that just resolves back to the original problem that Tindie solved, discoverability.

It's like saying people are fleeing ebay for Shopify. Yeah, I guess -- but that only really solves the merchant sales problem.

I buy from indie elec shops directly when I can, but the problem is that I commonly discover those shops thru tindie. Word of mouth/discord/etc isn't nearly as a great a tool as a searchable refreshing index.

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sixothree 61 days ago
For myself at least, discoverability is a huge thing for tindie. I'll go there for something specific and pretty much every single time just poke around until I find something else too. It's kind of like shopping for clothes - I want a new shirt, but some fancy new pants can't hurt.
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pseudohadamard 61 days ago
The EEVBlog folks have said good things about Elecrow, https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/tindie-down/msg624...
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pseudohadamard 61 days ago
Several sites are like this. Weather Underground has been in the process of migrating to a newer code base any day now since IBM bought them ten years ago, and now that they're private-equity owned I expect even more neglect than the two part-time interns IBM had maintaining it. Pity because it's a great site, it's just been running on life-support for a decade or more.

Another one is the TradeMe site in New Zealand, notable for being one of the few countries where eBay isn't dominant. This is from DailyWTF, they've been "doing some upgrades" for forever, every time you hit one of their countless bugs you get a note that it's due to the upgrades that have been going on now since the place got taken over by.. whaddya know, another private-equity firm.

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JohnMakin 61 days ago
It can be as simple as a terraform apply wiping out huge swaths of the backend infra, getting that back, depending on how disciplined you are, can take in the order of days/weeks.
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