Simply Plural is Being Sunset. Now What?
Hi all! I personally am not a tech professional, just a hobbyist nerd, so please take my opinions with a grain of salt.
Hello everyone,
Before I head into the details of this blog post, I want to first and foremost make clear that this was not an easy decisio
In a blog post on March 7th (today, as of posting), Amaryllis, the Simple Plural developer, has announced that SP will no longer be receiving updates. The app will remain downloadable and usable, and they will maintain the servers for the forseeable future, as well as doing work necessary for SP's continued usage (i.e resolving server issues and fixing critical bugs). However, no new feature updates will be released.
Please do not harass or be rude to the SP dev for this. This is honestly not very surprising to me. Solo development is hard, especially with hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. They're making a good choice.
You can find some Q&As in the post itself. I'll copy the most crucial here (all emphasis mine).
Q: How long will the servers remain online?
A: "I unfortunately cannot give you a clear answer, it depends on various factors. […] However, at the bare minimum we wish to keep the servers online until at least June 1st 2026, and in the event funding becomes a problem until then, we'll fund the servers for the remaining time ourselves. In any case, we will be giving a formal notice one to two months prior to shutting down the servers."
Q: What happens to user data and avatars?
A: "To comply with legal requirements and to respect the privacy of our users, once we officially shut down the servers, the data and avatars associated with users will be permanently deleted. However, users will have a chance to export their user data and avatars under "Settings -> Account Settings -> Export your data" before this date. To prevent overloading the servers, we would ask you to not rush to exporting your user data right after this announcement. We will give sufficient up-front notice before the servers are shut down, to give everyone a chance to export in time."
Q: What other tools exist to replace Simply Plural?
A: "PluralKit (Website / Discord), and the Octocon (Android / Apple / Discord) app, are both an alternative to Simply Plural, which are both available for free." (The blog post has links to download or use the listed usage methods of the apps.)
You can access a guide to migrating SP data to Octocon here. Note that Octocon's guide indicates custom field data and front history will be imported into Octocon, which is not the case for PK.
EDIT: Octocon's dev (team?) seems to be anti-endo (this is a link to a Reddit post of a screenshot from the Octocon Discord server, stating "Octocon's bot, app, and communities are not intended to be used by those who identify as 'non-traumagenic' systems in any capacity. In addition, positive discussion of concepts such as purposefully creating alters, appropriated tulpamancy, and 'system-hopping' are banned."). It's up to you whether you use it or not.
Now for my personal thoughts and opinions.
It is likely that we'll see multiple failed "Simply Plural 2" apps in the following months. As I said earlier, solo development is hard, and I expect that some people will dive head-first into it, intending to fill the gap, and either never release, or release a buggy, poorly-designed mess. Please try to be kind to these people. And if you're thinking about creating such a tool, please consider: do you have the money for enough server space to host 100 million front entries? Potentially more? Are you prepared to secure funding for this, and how will you do that? Do you have enough free time to serve the concurrent feature requests and bug reports of 200,000 users? The most critical barriers here are money and time. It has nothing to do with determination or capability.
You should migrate your SP data elsewhere, even if you won't use that app, so that you have long-term security. As mentioned in the blog post, you don't need to rush this process. There is plenty of time, and the dev will make it clear in advance if the servers are going to go down. If you have your data stored in PK or Octocon, you can safely retrieve it later, possibly months or years later, without needing to worry about if everything will still be there or if the app will even function. These are not things that are guaranteed for SP anymore.
This is a good time to consider if you need or want to rely on an app. PluralKit requires an internet connection to function. Octocon requires phone access. I understand that for many people, apps are more accessible than writing information in a journal or a text file on your computer. But I highly recommend ensuring you have your information elsewhere, somewhere that doesn't rely on someone else's computers and your own internet connection. You may also find that your needs aren't fully met by apps - PluralKit has no custom fronter or custom field feature. Only registered members can be logged as fronting, and descriptions have a 1000 character limit. You might find that you have lots of information to store, and so using a notes app is better because there's no limitations. Or, you might find PK unintuitive or difficult to use, and in that case would also benefit from saving your data elsewhere. I know people use apps for a reason - we use them too. But I highly recommend thinking about this.
Edit: this whole section. It used to be only about exporting to PK.
Exporting Your Simply Plural Data:
This will give you a .json file containing almost all of your data. This includes:
Member data (ID, name, avatar url, description, privacy buckets, colour, pronouns, custom field data (though the fields are listed by ID rather than name), notes)
Group data (members listed by ID rather than name)
Poll data (though the members are listed by ID rather than name)
Account data (name, description, colour, friends)
This export file is not intended to be used with other apps. It is so that you have a copy of your data. If you currently have nowhere to move your data to, I would recommend getting an export (make sure it has all of your data; some people have reported it missing data as a result of the amount of concurrent exports) so that you have your data ready when you figure something out.
Again, this file is not intended to be used with other apps: it's unlikely that you'll find something where you can import this file and have all your data there. This is so that you have a local copy.
1. Open Simply Plural. Go to Settings -> Account -> Export your data.
2. Select the "Request data export" button.
3. The email address connected to your SP account should receive an email with an export.json file. Download this file. (Make sure to check your spam folder if you don't see it.)
4. This email also includes a link to download all of your avatars. If this is something you need, I'd recommend using it! It'll download as a .zip file. It will only include avatars that were uploaded directly to Simply Plural; avatars that are sourced from links elsewhere, like if you imported from PluralKit, will not be contained here.
Currently to my understanding, the major alternatives are PluralKit, Octocon, and Ampersand.
Ampersand is an in-development desktop app that is unable to handle large system sizes (some people have reported issues with member counts around 20-30).
Octocon has a mobile app, but as mentioned previously, the creators are anti-endo so you may not want to or be unable to use it. I have also heard it is screenreader unfriendly. I cannot attest to its usability, since I have never used it.
PluralKit does not have a mobile app, and is designed to be used via Discord, but does have a web dashboard where a decent amount of system information can be managed. (System info, member info, and group info can be managed via the dashboard, as well as privacy config. Fronts and switches cannot be managed via the dashboard.) I personally have experience with PluralKit and I can say it's probably the best alternative for larger systems right now. If you have a member count in the thousands you can join the PluralKit Discord server and ask for your member and group count limit to be raised in the update-requests channel.
You may find PluralKit unintuitive or difficult to use because it requires usage of commands in Discord chat (you can use it entirely through its DMs, you don't need to be in a server with it), but it does have a web dashboard that may be more intuitive. Keep in mind you need to do the initial setup of the bot via Discord, as detailed below.
You'll need to do this via Discord. The PK dashboard requires a token to use, which can only be acquired by already having a system.
Create a new system on PluralKit. On Discord, this can be done with the command pk;s new in PluralKit's DMs.
Get your token by typing pk;token. Copy it to your clipboard.
Go to the Simply Plural app. In Settings, go to "Integrations", and select "Export to PluralKit".
Paste your token in the token field, select all of the override options except displayname, disable "export new members as private", then export. This may take a while if you have lots of members and groups.
Once the export is done, you can use pk;s list to see your members, and pk;m name to see a specific member's info.
Member names, descriptions, pronouns, colour, and avatars if the avatars were uploaded as a URL. If avatars were uploaded as an image, you will need to reassign them to members by using pk;m name avatar with the image as an attachment. If a member's name has spaces in it, you will need to write their name in quotes, as in pk;m "The Curious" avatar (you will need to do this for all discord commands with this member).
Archived members will be exported by default, with all of their data.
What Doesn't Get Exported:
Groups, front history, current fronters, custom fields (neither their existence nor their data), messages on message boards, member notes.
Polls, poll data, chat, friends, account info (like system name and description), custom front statuses.
Most of these things don't get exported because PK has no corresponding feature (it has no poll feature, or custom fields, for example). Some of these things do have a corresponding feature (front history and current fronters, account info). Please make sure you save all of the data that's important to you!
If you type pk;export, PK will DM you with a system.json file that you can download to your device. This file is only compatible with PK, however it contains all the information of your system and members in plain text. As an example:
"uuid": "not-typing-a-uuid",
"display_name": "Nepeta (she/her)",
"birthday": "2000-01-01",
"avatar_url": "https://example.png",
"banner": "https://example-banner.png",
"description": "This is a description!\nAnd, that '\n' symbol indicates a new line!"}]
It saves more data, like when the member was created, their proxy tags, … there's a TTS flag in here I didn't know you could do that, their message count, last message time, privacy data. But you can see how all of the data you might want to export elsewhere is still present here, even if another app might not be able to use the file itself. This is useful because it means that you don't need to rely on PK to have access to the information of your system, and you don't need to rely on PK's native exporting processes to get that information. So, I highly recommend exporting to a safe location, preferably on a device only you can access.
The following apps are from feastingwithghosts. I'm highlighting the ones that may be able to replace SP features, especially those that PK lacks.
If you're using PK's web dashboard rather than through Discord, you can set up a fronters.cc page to show who is fronting to other people.
PSA if you are using Discord, other people can type pk;s \@you front to see your current fronters. If they know your system ID, they can use that instead of pinging you. You can change this by using pk;s privacy (to see available privacy settings and their status) or pk;s private (to set all privacy settings to private). Also check out pk;m name privacy and pk;g name privacy.
You can change member and group privacy in bulk on the PK web dash, and you can use pk;config private [member/group] [on/off] to toggle whether member / group privacy settings should be set to private (on) or public (off) when creating a new member or group.
When exporting from SP, there's an option to export new members as private. I recommended disabling this in the guide above because if you set your members to private, the pk;s list command won't show any members and I didn't want to cause panic. I'd recommend using pk;config show private on, which will show private info when an account associated with the system queries it. So, you can type pk;m name and see all of the data, but other users will only see the public data (you can type pk;m name -public to see how the member's card displays to other users).
Also, you will probably need to use the -a flag if your members are set to private (i.e pk;s list -a, pk;g name list -a)
Also check out PerfectPK and PKSwitcher for web-only PK switching, as PK's web dashboard currently doesn't have switch logging capability.
pronouns.cc allows users to make subprofiles for headmates. To my understanding (I haven't used it), this means an avatar, name, description, and of course pronouns. Maybe also identity flags?
SysChat is an offline in-sys chat app, for desktop. Antar is on iOS and android. I have not used either of these and cannot comment on their usability.
Remember that your SP data is currently safe, and SP itself won't disappear tomorrow. You have time to get things in order.
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