I think the obvious question is: can you shed any light or provide context on why the service was shut down?

And if not, it seems unrealistic to expect people to adopt / trust your alternative.

I think it's oddly telling or suspicious at the very-least that this dev isn't giving you a straight answer to your question.

The timeline is possibly informative.

> The timeline is possibly informative.

Where is a link to the timeline?

"Then, one day in February 2020, as COVID-19 swept the globe, access to FireChat was completely cut off without explanation."

That is… not very informative at all.

Hong Kong now being part of China, and not an independent regime anymore?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9...

My first piece of code (substantive) was an ecommerce platform (frontend and backend). Complete overkill, and the startup was dead a year later, but the project itself was fun.

Likely 15k+ lines of code, not a single unit test; simpler times :)

Super strange, I'm seeing the exact same thing, the only significant location is a grocery store that I semi-frequent.