There are backups, the db is safe. But you can't easily fix a Docker Swarm cluster when Docker refuses to run, systemd tries to replace upstart, etc. The message I wrote tells the whole story, and backups were not the problem (I even had a redundant 3 way database cluster which most commercial companies don't have).
It seems that posts stay floated near the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/best for a max of maybe ~5-6 days. This has been up for 1-2 days and from a conservative engineering perspective I'd probably be comfortable relying on it staying there for at least 2 more.
So you have a one-shot opportunity for the next day or two to consider changing the webpage to say something different.
Reading the sentiment amongst the comments and the perspective you've also shared, some significant points emerge for me:
- This is a side project you were really invested in and you're really sad to see it go
- It wasn't generating very much money, but you weren't in it for the money
- A few people definitely used and appreciated it - so it had a decent bit of mindshare
IMHO this could easily either go the open source route, or a small private team of assistants could help contribute to getting this going again and maybe contribute toward maintaining it in as people have spare time available.
- You appear to have some level of one-step-beyond-MVP mindshare, and a catchy name. Not only would this make it tricky for forks to take off in an open-source setting, but I can also see full-clone attempts being promptly chased away with pitchforks as well. This is the scenario where open source shines I think - the risk of wholesale copying seems interestingly low.
- You aren't interested in this for the money, so opening the codebase doesn't really let especially novel cats out of any bags
- There is enough clear interest that people will definitely show up to help
Some other considerations:
- Instead of committing to open-sourcing immediately you could also build a team out of all the people expressing interest in contributing spare time. I honestly wonder if the energy level would be lower than a traditional open source project. In this case I can see enough interest coming to the table to help unravel the existing codebase, and enough people might even stick around long-term to help out with simple maintenance hitches and fixes as they come up.
- If there were any concerns about forks/clones the exceptionally restrictive AGPLv3 would probably take care of those sufficiently well (perhaps this is a good question for the theoretical team mentioned above)
TL;DR, my opinion is that if you maybe want to take a break for a while but dive back into this in the future CHANGE THE WEBPAGE NOW while eyeballs are still looking at it. Point people at a Discord server or empty GitHub repository (lots of closed-source stuff uses GitHub for issues) to pin or star so they get pinged when there's activity in the future.
Of course the caveat is that I can only respond to the context I can see, and this may not be useful advice. Kind of an on-the-spot "uhhhhh....", good luck :P
There are backups, the db is safe. But you can't easily fix a Docker Swarm cluster when Docker refuses to run, systemd tries to replace upstart, etc. The message I wrote tells the whole story, and backups were not the problem (I even had a redundant 3 way database cluster which most commercial companies don't have).