InInteraction

Repl.it's announcement of significant changes to its Starter Plan on a Friday evening, effective the following Monday, left many of its users, particularly teachers and students, scrambling. The late-evening email provided educators with virtually no time to adjust lesson plans or inform students and parents before the changes took effect. Considering the platform's extensive use in educational settings, this move appears highly inconsiderate and poorly timed, and it feels particularly unethical. The timing of the announcement, immediately before a new week, suggests a deliberate attempt to limit user feedback and expedite the implementation of unpopular changes.

Email: From: Replit <contact@mail.replit.com> Date: Fri, Aug 23, 2024 at 9:47 PM Subject: Replit Starter Plan Changes

Hello,

We’re reaching out to tell you about changes to your Starter plan.

What is changing?

    Number of Repls: The Starter plan is now limited to 3 Repls. Upgrade to Core for unlimited* Repls.
    Collaboration limits: 1 collaborator per Starter account, 3 for Core, and your entire org for Teams.
    Storage retention: Repls will be subject to deletion after 1 year of inactivity on the Starter plan.
    Deployments:
        Starter plan users can Deploy a single static site without a credit card on file (1 GiB outbound data transfer limit). This change will roll out in the next few weeks.
        Autoscale, Reserved VM, and Scheduled Deployments now need to be tied to a Core account. If you have active Deployments of these types, you’ll receive a separate email with more details.
    Development
        Development time: The Starter plan is limited to 600 development minutes per month. Upgrade to Core for no development time limits.
        Development outbound data transfer: changing Starter plan limit to 1 GiB.
        Development storage: changing the Starter plan limit to 2 GiBs.

Unless mentioned above, these changes will fully take effect on August 26th.

We understand that this may impact how you use Replit. We've carefully considered these adjustments to ensure we can continue providing a sustainable platform for all our users.

For a full overview of the changes, see replit.com/pricing. If you have any questions about the changes, please reach out to support@replit.com

The Replit Team

Once upon a time Jack said that Twitter initially was very open in its early stages but eventually became much more centralized, and the scale of supporting such a centralized network in the future could be unsustainable. “Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization,” he added. “Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there.” Are there any truly decentralized social communication tools/protocols to look at?