Perhaps part of the problem behind the shutdown (just my assumption here) is that nobody knew at all what they did. I don't mean this badly, but they were always just that recognizable logo and their landing page that kept popping up on Dribbble or on DN. I was never sure if it was an agency, or an app to find co-founders, or to collorate on ideation... I mean that as no slight, it's clear to many people that wasn't the case, and I always appreciated the lightweight and refined design styles.

As someone who open sourced a side-project on Assembly last year (Octobox), this is sad news, but not too surprising. Initial response for Octobox was great, but as soon as that first wave of interest died down, there was just complete silence. It's the main reason project is offline now, as I didn't have the capacity to work on it myself, or interest to turn it into yet another boastful startup.

It's a very powerful idea for a website/community, but, ironically, it suffered from problems exactly opposite to those faced by open source projects. It was over-designed and not active enough. I wish the team focused on contributing more to projects, and finding contributors, instead of redesigning the portal over and over.

The sentence seems a bit misleading. They're saying products made by Assembly were used by 4 million people not that Assembly had 4 million users. Or am I reading that incorrectly?

Super disappointed about this one - Assembly was great for the 7+ months I was part of the community. Built some cool stuff, met plenty of great people, huge catalyst to produce new portfolio work and try out product ideas. Led to plenty of personal and career development for me.

But then they transitioned to being "changelog" which I think was a pivot to try and salvage the company. Not surprised to read this after seeing it lose steam over the last few months.

Still, kudos to the whole Assembly team. Really was an amazing idea. Wish it could have worked.

Didn't Assembly recently change directions from being a type of open-source collaborative platform to change logs with comments?

Is it possible radical change contributed to its demise? Or am I misunderstanding the situation?

Disappointed, but saw this coming. Worked on a few Assembly-based projects, and while the people involved were generally great, it was hard to keep track of what was happening within a project and keep things organised. All of the projects (5 or 6) just fizzled out.

Was hoping to see something happen out of the Buckets CMS but should've feared the worst considering there's been no progress for 6 months.

It seemed to me like Assembly was a not-as-good GitHub clone that let you open bounties on issues to incentivize them. I dunno if I'm surprised, you'd need to do a lot to beat GitHub.