Moving on: announcing the sunset date for All Men
Here at HumanOps, we’ve had a difficult decision to make.
Beginning today, we’re winding down one of our oldest social identity products, Men. Official support for Men will cease as of April 9, 2020. No future major releases are planned. While Men were core to our early strategy, we’ve learned a ton about their shortcomings as we’ve grown.
It’s time for us to focus our resources elsewhere.
We recognize that this announcement will come as a surprise to many of our customers. We understand your anxiety and we are committed to making this transition to new social identity configurations as painless as we can.
We know that many existing deployments of Men are causing problems for customers committed to long-term, sustainable strategies for community building and resource sharing. We are working hard on a patch that will allow our other offerings to circumvent and mitigate these challenges. We look forward to sharing an early-access testing release for this patch in the coming weeks.
Next, we want to be as transparent as possible in working with our customers during this migration. We understand you will have many questions about the shortcomings of Men that have precipitated this decision. We have dedicated significant personnel time and other resources to documenting these issues. We look forward to answering your questions as thoroughly as possible through our standard support and documentation channels.
What this means for existing deployments of our Men product
We know that a handful of core frameworks are essential to the operation of many instances of our Men product. These are:
- Toxic masculinity
- Crippling emotional constipation
- Constant insecurity
- Entitlement to the time and personhood of others
While it is these components that have convinced us to move our product mix in another direction, we recognize the importance of providing a means to offer maintenance and bug fixes to existing deployments.
Therefore, HumanOps is releasing these frameworks under an open source licensing and governance model. It is our hope that by passing these components to a committed community of maintainers, the work of fixing Men can continue long after the end of our official support for this product.
We know that you rely on us for your important work. It’s important to us to make this transition as straightforward as possible. We are at your service during this time and we are excited to share all the new possibilities this strategic shift will enable for both ourselves and all our customers.
Sunset FAQ
But not all men are —
This isn’t a question.
Will my favorite feature of Men be going away forever?
Probably not! There are many features popularly associated with the Men product that we look forward to helping you integrate into our current and future offerings. While we value many pieces of the Men product, they are often overshadowed by a handful of powerful shortcomings.
It is our hope that our new direction will create opportunities to surface these exciting features in a way that is more useful and powerful for all our customers across the board.
If we can no longer deploy new instances of Men, doesn’t that dramatically limit our options?
Not even a little bit! There are many alternative configurations to choose from to emphasize the preferences, strategies and unique challenges of any individual deployment. We look forward to fruitful conversations about this wealth of configuration options and regret that our previous positioning of our product offerings created this false impression of limits.
I am a long-time user of the Men product and its associated ecosystems. How can I migrate to a new social identity product?
We are working on documentation to help with your migration challenges, including ecosystem dependencies. We also urge you to join our support communities to discuss your options with other customers who may have experience with migrations like yours. Finally, we encourage you to investigate your migration options with an open mind. There are many exciting alternatives open to you and we hope you’ll find migration to be a rewarding investment.
We enjoy building humanity with you each and every day. Thank you for being part of HumanOps.
Read more:
We have a difficult announcement to make. Beginning today we're winding down the Parse service, and Parse will be fully…blog.parse.com
Special thanks/profuse apologies to Parse and Kevin Lacker, whose superb sunset announcement provided substantial inspiration for the structure and tone of this piece.
Previously, on Twitter:
