Hey Bubblers,
Wow, writing this letter is really hard. I've been trying to start it for the past 2 hours, and still haven't quite come up with the right things to say.
I'm just going to go ahead and break the news at the start, no long lead up. Purple Bubble is dead.
As an organization we fought really hard for a little while, through things like loosing our fiscal sponsor, and just a lack of motivation.
Ultimately, the lack of motivation combined with the fact that lots of the core team are still in school, lead us to the decision to sunset Purple Bubble. Okay, here's the part that might make me cry...
There's been tons of people that helped make purple bubble a reality, but I just wanted to shout out a few.
Firstly, Kieran. Kieran has been my total and absolute rock through the entirety of Purple Bubble's existence. 🪨 He's been there from the beginning, and even participated in my midnight crazed fundraising projects. (none of which ever where successful btw)
Next, Samuel. Sam designed our first ever project for purple bubble, a very minimal matrix client. (I think it still works? You'll have to check it out for yourself over on github.) Sam really did help keep us moving, and often called us out as a team when we got too into the organizing and bureaucracy and needed to keep it real and make a product.
Luke ~ While a later addition to our team, Luke really did probably the most actual dev work for PB. Luke collaboratively created our first version of the protocol, v1.0.0 (Jasper), affectionately named after the place in Canada (not me, I promise!). He even had started working on a node implementation of said protocol, that can also still be found on our github.
Aram ~ WOW. In a way, you can say that Aram has actually been part of Purple Bubble longer than I have. He was the origin signer on our HCB org before I was, and has been around and helping with design when he can ever since.
Reese ~ Part of the very beginnings of Purple Bubble, Reese has definitely been a super strong voice on Purple Bubble, helping kickstart the organization, and still serving as an advisor to the PB board.
Okay, that's enough of that for now. So. Purple Bubble... what's next? Well, from us? Nothing.
The team is parting ways, and we'll be shutting down the organizy parts of Purple Bubble, like our domain, team emails, HCB org, and anything else like that.
This doesn't have to be the end tho! Purple Bubble lives on in the heart of open source! The github organization will remain up and anyone who wants to continue on Purple Bubble can continue to do so by making PRs! I can't promise I'll always review them right away, but I definitely will whenever I can, and you can always email me at me@jaspermayone.com to give me a bit of a nudge. 😉
Additionally, several of us have amazing newsletters you can sign up for to learn about our amazing projects, I highly encourage ya'll to go sign up for them! Most of them are linked to the person's name in this email, and mine can be found here. (Thank you for enduring some small shameless self promo 😊) We're also going to keep this newsletter up and running, and members of the team might occasionally send some updates when they do cool and exiting things! (one might be coming very soon for one of my new projects!)
In our final acts as a team, some of us are also investigating the creation of some form of coding online community, more on that to come soon when we've concluded our last bits of research.
For some of you who might have hung around in my personal channel, you might know that I'm also a circus artist. In the circus, at the end of a tour, camp, or training stint, we have a tradition of saying "See you down the road." This means that someday, sometime, we'll meet again, and the same applies here, to each one of you as bubblers
Okay this email has gone on FAR too long, but I have one more thank you to make.
drumroll please 🥁
Lastly, I want to thank ALL OF YOU. You, the bubblers, are what really made this project such a blast to work on, and what kept us as a team going. Never stop bubbling, and see you down the road.
💜 Jasper & the rest of the PB team
