This is adapted from a draft of a rant we wrote, but never posted, in the PluralKit support server. It's a bit sweary.
This isn't a post I wanted to be writing.
After the recent announcements of both Simply Plural and Octocon shutting down; and developers of other plural-focused applications (like Ampersand) taking hiatuses for mental health reasons, I had the unfortunate experience of dealing with the influx of people to the PluralKit support server, wanting to move their data to PluralKit. I wasn't expecting it to be anywhere near as bad as it was - and in the PK support server, we didn't see anywhere near the extent of what the devs of the apps themselves were seeing.
Although I would hope that this would be obvious to most of the people reading this, the people who develop the kind of plural-focused tools/apps that you may use (Simply Plural; Octocon; Ampersand; and of course PluralKit) - are people, just like you. We have emotions, we have lives outside of developing these tools. Unfortunately, there seems to be a small - but vocal - minority of people in the plural community who have forgotten this.
I've personally seen some of the messages that have been sent to the developers of those apps (both before, and in the wake of, their respective announcements) - which have been some of the most vitriolic things I've ever had the misfortune of reading. The amount of hate, doxxing, and outright death threats directed at the people who have been devoting so much of their own time and effort, and spending money out of their own pockets, to provide useful tools for this community is, quite frankly, disgusting.
Although a lot of these tools have quite different intended audiences, different feature-sets, and different goals for their own tools; the devs of these tools all share a common purpose, a common drive - to help our communities. It fucking sucks that a vocal minority has decided to burn that goodwill by harassing the devs of some of these tools (of which PluralKit is not immune - I, personally, have received some quite horrific hateful DMs during downtimes!) because things haven't gone exactly the way some random person in a Discord server wanted them to go.
The sheer amount of misinformation & slander, on top of the outright vitriolic hate, the developers of plural-focused tools are exposed to on a regular basis - especially in recent days - is horrifying. We deserve better than to have to deal with this.
And if you are one of the small number of people directing vitriol at the developers of this community's tools - go fuck yourself, because you're the reason these tools are disappearing.
Fuck.