alt Hacker NewsWhat's with the expiration?
> # Announcement
After much back and forth with the community and the team internally, we can reveal a bit more of what's happening. Tindie transitioned to new ownership on April 14. Due to circumstances beyond the control of the new owners, the site was immediately put into maintenance mode. Since then, the process of transitioning the site to new infrastructure and upgrading the aging codebase has been ongoing. The intention was, as I originally thought, to do this seamlessly with no downtime. However, once the site was put into maintenance mode and the transition happened. it was decided to take the time to work on the site and get things up to modern standards. The new owners are genuinely excited about Tindie and what the platform can be. After a year or so on cruise control, we're finally going to make substantial investments in the platform and community -- something which in my humble opinion is long overdue.
# Timeframe
Again, I still don't have an exact timeframe for the completion of this work. I know that is what the community wants to know more than anything, and it's very frustrating that I can't satisfy your answers about that.
I know that the new tech team is working hard with the Supplyframe team to complete all the transition steps and ensure things are done properly.
# Who Am I?
I figured many of you already know me, but my name is Alexander Rowsell. I'm the editor of the Tindie Blog and the social media manager. I've been with Tindie for a few years, and I'll be around for the foreseeable future. I do embedded development work, but I also really enjoy writing about what the community is up to. It's always a blast to go through the newest listings on Tindie to see what people are creating!
I'll be honest with you, I was worried about Tindie over the last few months. I could see that the site needed attention from a professional dev team and was worried the site would break totally before that happened. Well, there has been downtime, but the upside is that the site will be refreshed and ready for the long term. Short-term pain for long-term stability -- that's where we're at.
I wanted to write a longer statement, and seeing as how the Tindie Blog itself is down I figured this was the next best thing. To verify this statement is actually from me, I've signed it with my GPG key - B5CFBEB4EE9FE813. You can verify this signature by getting the raw text of this post, and verifying the signature using GPG.
Replies
> “It was decided”
Ah yes, definitely the language of an organization that totally wants to communicate with candor.
Also zero information about the new owners other than the name of a shell corp associated with an existing "EETree" company in Jiangsu, China that gets (mis?)represented as “a Washington State company”. Much honest, such wow. Sure, there's technically an LLC in Washington, but that's like calling pre-2020 Google "a Bermuda company" (which, tbf, is what Google did to avoid taxes via their Irish ~~subsidiary~~ "parent" company).
And still no information, remarks, or even acknowledgement for all the tindie sellers who’ve been unable to withdraw their funds.
The address listed at https://ccfs.sos.wa.gov/ ( 1475 NW SWENSON CT, POULSBO, WA, 98370 ) is shown on Google Maps as just being a completely empty plot by 2026 aerial photography. There's no way a whole house was built in < 10 weeks and someone was actually living there on February 25, 2026 when that address became their legally official place to reach someone at the company.
It's probably illegal to list that as the address -- the whole point of having a "Registered Agent" for businesses is so that if someone needs to serve the business with legal papers (like Tindie sellers suing for not being able to access their funds) then there's an actual person at an actual place where legal documents can be legally served. If someone doesn't want to make their own address public or isn't actually located in the state, "renting" a proper registered agent only costs $125/year - it doesn't require much more than a glorified mail-forwarding service, they receive your documents, scan them, and email them to you and the courts are happy with that because the business officially got served. It's a bit hard to serve papers to an empty lot.
Not providing a real address where someone can be located is a pretty bad sign for how much this ownership intends to respect any US laws. It's also potentially in violation of RCW 23.95.405, .415, .605 and RCW 43.07.210 & RCW 40.16.030, with penalties up to 6 years of incarceration and/or $15,000 in fines, dissolution of the company, and (most relevant to anyone who can't withdraw their funds from Tindie) a loss of "limited liability" status making the owners/directors/officers personally responsible for anything the LLC owes to anyone.
On the plus side, this year is the first year since the 2023 incorporation that the mandatory annual report wasn't a delinquent filing.
The business has had 3 addresses filed for it since incorporation:
(2023-2024) Principal place of business (a townhome): 1605 S WASHINGTON ST STE A, SEATTLE, WA, 98144-3193, UNITED STATES
(2023-2025) Registered agent (a house with 3 boats): 23022 49TH A VE SE, BOTHELL, WA, 98021
(Effective Feb 25 2026) Registered agent (which was photographed in 2026 to be a completely barren residential plot): 1475 NW SWENSON CT, POULSBO, WA, 98370
> What's with the expiration?
Generous interpretation - perhaps this is the default for posts on that site.
Less generous interpretation - definitely quite a weird way of posting something, including references to a GPG key, rather than some kind of pre-existing public social media account (which I'm assuming a social media manager would have) or a page on the Tindie domain.