Community moderators and contributors have released a statement:
Many people in the Artemis community have been patient and understanding of the lack of activity, ever since a prior period of radio silence was justified by Hariette saying that she was recovering from chronic pain.
However, this has gone on for long enough that the official Artemis Camp instance has failed over and never recovered. This is a problem for Artemis app users, since it is the only instance that is supported.
We are also unable to continue performing our duties as moderators in the Camp instance as a result. This effectively means that the entire project is dead.
Statement by Artemis Moderators
It sounds like Henriette couldn’t keep up due to health issues and I hope she’s doing okay under the circumstances.
It feels like there is one app per user and since Lemmy hasn’t been growing much (looks like it’s been shrinking lately) it’s probably unavoidable for this to happen. I’d love to see everything grow, but that’s just the hype cycle I guess. I’m pretty sure this sadly won’t be the last project to slowly fade out of existence.
Sorry to be such a downer ^^
As long as a project inspires others, brings innovation and pushes the bigger ones to keep the pace, it’s not such a bad news.
The only bad thing about fragmentation is that resources are “dispersed” and you may end up with many apps, none of which is complete. Fortunately this is not the case for Lemmy, there are half a dozen full fledged and functional clients out there, besides a constellation of small projects which are made just for fun and probably have more a “learning/testing/amusement” purpose rather than effectiveness.