[0]: >>46264492
> Governance and decision-making: How decisions are made, who has final say, and how the community is heard
> Roadmap and priorities: What gets built when and how to balance competing needs
> The transition itself: How to bring in more support without disrupting what already works
In other words: they have no clue what to do next (https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/ankis-growing-up/68610/2#p-1905...)
That is modern Anki. The core is a Rust library, which all the clients (desktop, web, Android and iOS) use. [0]
[0]: >>46299897
With that out of the way, some thoughts:
- Anki is in a really good position to work around enshitification. The app, at least to me, is "complete" - the only additional features that might pique my curiosity is a different scheduler (at the moment, they're integrating a newer one, although I don't follow enough to know the state of it). Additionally, modern Anki is really well architected: the core of it is a Rust library, that is used by all of the platforms [0]. You can write new front ends using that, or just fork the existing FOSS ones. Maybe dae does a gorhill and gives us Anki Origin.
- Really the only service-y part of Anki I use is AnkiWeb, which is basically a backup and sync system. Wonder how that'll evolve (if they do end up charging for it, I hope it is "Obsidian" reasonable). EDIT: Ooo, Anki has public server software for running your own version. Awesome! [1]
- The idea outcome in my opinion would have been some form of charitable organisation (Linux Foundation?), with people donating to support Anki.
- So, AnkiHub is a company that produces Anki flashcards, and they've scaled that quickly? Jeez. Obviously Quizlet proved there was a market for flashcards, but I didn't realise this was possible for Anki.
- No outside investment is... hopeful. Not quite sure what indicates that this company has the technical know-how to maintain it.
- I've heard too many stories of a maintainer or creative being "hopeful" about their new acquirers, only to regret it years down the line.
[0]: >>46299897
----
To copy from my message on Discord:
> I’m moving to a full-time position working on Anki [incl. AnkiWeb & AnkiMobile]. I’m really excited about this, but there’s a mountain of pending, somewhat undefined work which will need to be done, and it’ll need my full-time attention for a while.
> I’ll still be contributing to AnkiDroid, but I won’t be able to commit as much time as I am doing currently (at least for the first few months while things stabilize). I’ll be here on evenings/weekends, and will be contributing in other ways (hopefully: unified Note Editor, JS addons etc… ), but I expect to slow down with code contributions to ensure I’m staying on on top of PR reviews & general force multiplier work. I’m definitely Org Admin’ing for GSoC over the summer [assuming Google gives us the greenlight], it’s historically been a VERY light role.
> In all honesty: I’m expecting things to be business as usual, I have more than enough capacity to keep up with the notification queue. Even if I completely dropped off the planet, we’re a great team and the improvements would keep on flowing. AnkiDroid’s bus factor has been >>> 1 for a LONG time now.
https://discord.gg/qjzcRTx => https://discord.com/channels/368267295601983490/701922522836...
https://orangeorapple.com/flashcards/
Easy to import and export my cards, plenty of options for tweaking the algorithms for my use.
https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The...
It seems like the core things that Anki needs are new user experience improvements, and algorithm updates. SM2 really shows its age as compared to other algorithms.
AnkiHub's modus operandi has been to take over communities or projects where free exchange happens and monetize/paywall them. If you've been a part of the /r/medicalschoolanki subreddit, you know exactly what I mean. It's been hollowed out completely.
In the post, AnkiHub mentions how Anki is "sacred" to them. Yet, they have had no qualms entrenching themselves into Anki's settings menu as the only third-party ever to do so. [1] I am sure more is to come. And the language used in their post almost never helps their case, especially in the pricing and OSS sections.
I understand why Damien felt he was being a bottleneck in Anki's development. This is similar to what was happening with Bram and Vim. Ultimately, the community forked and built Neovim. Gorhill had also similarly transferred uBlock, but then came back and built uBlock Origin. So the precedents are there for a successful community-run or leader-run spinoff.
Syncing is sure to become a paid feature, and access to shared decks too.
Creating a fork pointed to a hosted version of Sync Server [2], and an alternative hub where people can share decks other than AnkiWeb [3] is paramount. As well as saving and preserving all of the decks there, as they are sure to go behind a paywall.
I, and I am sure many other HNers, would be willing to support that with our time and financially.
[0] https://www.ankihub.net/about-us [1] https://github.com/ankitects/anki/pull/3232 [2] https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html [3] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks
That said, even SM-2 is probably vastly superior to just not doing SRS at all.
And I recently wrote about making my own Anki Japanese cards in my blog[1]
[1] https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-01-30-from-side-proje...
Writing the cards is engaging with the cards for some small subset of the population. I am part of that audience. But most people are terrible at it, and it's not an easy skill to build.
Ther majority of people who are interested in Anki -- and the vast majority of normal human beings with nonzero willingness to pay, which is a very unique subset of the population with goals that tend to look like "Pass X exam by Y date so I can [get a job|earn my citizenship in a better country|...] -- just want good pedagogical material wrapped in some control harness so they can treat some fraction of their learning the same way they treat going to the gym. Show up, put in the reps, get results.
[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/the-second-wave-of-spaced-...
It's mostly due to time/resource/technical constraints [some of our strings come from a shared backend], but we can do better here, especially if there's now a lot more community interest in the feature.
Pull requests welcome! Do feel free to get in touch on the issue/Discord.
So I used AI to help me write this, I gotta be honest, but I have this TUI I use over SSH to access HN. I call it Nitpick!
It's GPL, athttps://github.com/fragmede/nitpick
It uses the HN API and algolia and golang with the bubble tea libraries. I'm parsing/scraping the threads page though, because reconstructing that from the API was proving to be a hassle.
It even supports logging in and commenting and reply notification!
I'm not totally sure where I land on using libraries (bubble tea) as they do bloat the program with unnecessary features, but I do like its simple text interface over using a web browser and a whole javascript engine for just rendering text.
Anyway, patches welcome!
:)
You can edit the structure of the card templates so they're the 'right way around' for you:
Anki is a platform, not a content creator. I would be thankful that someome shared their hard work of creating a deck that has all of the content to meet your needs.
For what it's worth, there are many "RTK" decks for Japanese that show english keyword on front and expect you to write the kanji before flipping.
Maybe search for an "RTH" deck to go along with the book Remembering the Hanzi.
Anki is an extremely powerful and feature rich software, and it seems that you barely scratched the surface before dismissing it.
Edit: it took me 10 seconds to find this deck https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1489829777 there's probably a Simplified one as well. Good luck with your studies.
A really disappointing development all around & I hope it galvanizes the community to fully disassociate itself from AnkiHub & dae.
Ftr Danish is a category 1 language, while Japanese is category 4 ("https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages")
The deck you linked is not mentioning HSK in the description though. It was maybe 1 year ago or so, that I searched for HSK1-3 level decks and only got wrong direction ones.
I am searching again now:
(1) "HSK1 English" -- nothing
(2) "HSK1" -- lots of results, but also tons of results that are not relevant for me, because they are not for English. -- Results like https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1474834583 -- but that is 1-4 which is too much for me. I either need the 1, 2, 3 levels separate, or 1-3 in one deck. Also finding https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/166845167, which is the wrong way around. Starts right away by asking me "的" instead of something like "(some description here)". When I go to deck options in Anki desktop app, I see "Display Order", but there I cannot select any "English -> Chinese". Tons of options, but none that inverts what the cards show.
One sibling comment informs me, that I have to edit a template somewhere. But I don't know where, and in the deck options I don't quickly see any template editing function.
And this has been my experience with pretty much every HSK deck I found there. It would seem silly, that everyone uploads decks in the "wrong" order. Which leads me to think, that many people cheat themselves, by only doing the recognition part of learning the characters. Why else would so many people upload decks, only so that whoever who downloads the deck has to invert them first, before using them. I also think that many learners are probably not aware of the issue with seeing the character first and then translating to English, in comparison with doing it the other way around.
So now lets do your "RTH" search:
"HSK1 RTH" -- " Error: Please log in to perform more searches."
I am sorry, I cannot even do a keyword search a couple of times??? I need to log in, requiring an account (!) to even find a suitable deck?! OK, at this point I give up again.
We've got a setting [developer options only] which completely reimplements them, it won't be live for 2.24, but hopefully 2.25
https://github.com/ericli3690/gsoc-ankidroid-report/blob/mai...
https://github.com/ankitects/anki-manual/blob/main/src/sync-...
Full disclaimer - it's a feature which AnkiDroid supports, but isn't one which I use.
In the past 12 months, I've made £65.79 from GitHub Sponsors (no fees, thank you GitHub/Microsoft) and $87.89 from Patreon (pre-fees, I'll probably see ~$50), and a split of the Open Collective [below]
AnkiDroid GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/ankidroid
and finances/sponsorship: https://opencollective.com/ankidroid (with immense help from dae).
I've definitely hit walls with Anki over the years, and while the community decks help a lot, it's really nice to just tell Claude "can you take this assignment my tutor gave me, extract all the infinitive verbs, and then make cloze style cards for conjugations at an A1/A2 level?" and get it all done in a couple minutes.
It’s been a surprisingly good middle ground between fully manual cards and fully LLM dumps. If anyone’s curious: https://wordwise.me