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Comment by HeckFeck | Hacker News Reader

Have they open sourced the server? Revival projects should always do this, otherwise they are preserving nothing. A single point of failure means someone else will have to reverse-engineer the protocol and write the server software again in the future. Do it for posterity!

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There's another project, P3OL, that's also closed-source. I assume they're connected somehow.

P3OL makes 100€/month through Patreon, I guess that is also this project's reason to stay closed-source

There was Nina too and then they destroyed the discord over a weirdo pedo mod and took down the website. Also closed source because they’re also selfish.

The absolute state of FOSS communities in 2025. I'd rather teh good old days of pedantry, swearing and trolling instead.

Why wouldn't a project like this be OSS? How do they expect to monetize? People buying dialtone subscriptions as a social network?

Besides monetization there are other factors for not open sourcing.

* fear of being critizied for bad code

* not wanting to deal with contributions

* license compliance (maybe using something commercial, maybe trying to hide bad license usage)

* trying to keep control

* missing understanding of open source in general

* ...

So what is the idea with something then? Build software and...?

I'm unable to find the server, but it looks like they've released some protocol analysis tooling: https://github.com/iconidentify/wiretap

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