As a maintainer, I'm leaving the SearXNG project

Back in April 2021, after a lot of organizational issues regarding the code-review process within the SearX project. Alex (dalf) and I forked the project to create SearXNG. We got Markus (return42), who also wanted to join along for the ride, he was also an active SearX contributor.

The gain of popularity of the project was slow but steady, we positioned ourselves by saying we are a more actively maintained version of SearX because we fixed the engines faster than SearX (core feature of SearX(NG)). We even got ourselves a section in SearX readme about a controversial difference between SearX and SearXNG.

I won't lie, being a maintainer of both project, has boosted the popularity of SearXNG. Same for being in control of the public instances list and the SearX subreddit. I wasn't a developer, but instead I managed the public channels of SearXNG (Matrix and the Subreddit), managed the list of all the SearX & SearXNG public instances and maintaining the GitHub issues in both SearX & SearXNG projects. Well for SearX, until it got no longer maintained.

Since the creation of the project, SearXNG has gained a lot. We surpassed the SearX project by having 19k stars. We got 4 new maintainers in the team. There are more than 350 GitHub projects that are built upon SearXNG (or took inspiration from SearXNG). AI probably boosted the popularity of the project because we saw a popular Perplexity AI clone built using SearXNG: Perplexica. SearXNG is a great way to easily feed more context into an LLM because it has 246 well maintained search engines accessible through a simple API.

All members of the SearXNG team and all the external contributors can be proud of that.

But I lost motivation in the project one and a half years ago. At that time, I started to use Kagi Search instead of SearXNG, and I was very well occupied with Invidious, the other open source project I'm maintaining. This has led to the other members of the team dealing with the overall maintenance of SearXNG.

When I came back actively in the project a few months ago, SearXNG had diverged from the core principles me and Alex wanted to follow when we forked the SearX project. I'm a minimalist guy, I like tools that do a few things but very well and when things are tidy.
That's why, in Invidious, I'm often denying requests to add unnecessary features. And why the Invidious team puts effort into keeping the code tidy (SamantazFox and syeopite great work in code cleanup). And extra care in not breaking everyone workflow by spending a lot of time in reviews (sometimes too much to the eyes of others) before merging a PR.

Back to SearXNG, Markus and Bnyro (new member in the team) have been handling nearly all the development on their own during my low activity in the project, which I'm very thankful for. But the core principles, for which you can now deduct from above, about why I forked SearX to create SearXNG with Alex were no longer the project's main priorities. I would say they got put on the side. It is not necessarily wrong, the new priorities most likely fill a lot of user needs, many of which were looking for a complete alternative to big players in the search engine industry. And I respect the different ways of maintaining a project.

After a few months, unable to get SearXNG back on track with the values, Alex and I were rooting for. It's probably better for the project that I leave. I know I haven't always been kind in my comments, and I'm sorry for that. I think it came down to my strong desire to see SearXNG reflect the same values as Invidious—a project I'm deeply committed to and enjoy contributing to in my free time.

Alex also left the project a few days before I did. In addition to the values I mentioned earlier, his decision was largely influenced by years of unsuccessful efforts to make maintaining the core of SearXNG more accessible to external contributors.

I wish all the best future for SearXNG and their current maintainers. You will continue seeing me maintaining Invidious, and I have a lot of ideas for future open source projects I would like to work into. This is not the end of my time in the open source community, I'm just switching lanes in my open source path.

(My instance https://searx.be will keep working as long as the SearXNG maintainers keep the ability to simply run the software using python -m searx.webapp. However, I would advise you to look for another instance on https://searx.space)