We made this clear in the statement already, but I want to reiterate that this decision has been coming for a long while--since Hazel left, really.
We were desperate to keep the site up at that time, knowing how many people loved it and how large it had become. And honestly, looking back, I don't regret that decision but it wasn't the best one we could have made.
None of us are professionals or really had the time and energy to devote to this. The team was as big as it was because of that, but it still wasn't enough to compensate. That, and feeling like we had to scramble to keep things going, led to a lot of bad decisions. We trusted people we shouldn't have, made some misguided decisions early on that it was hard to come back from (like the way we dealt with off instance suspensions) and ended up overcompensating for accusations of being "too callout culture" by not being transparent enough. We owe all of you an apology for that.

We will be upgrading Berries to the most recent Mastodon update, so please standby during the brief outage. 

We're working on upgrading Berries, so you might get a few errors while we do so! This is also a heads up just in case there's an outage again.

We're attempting to fix our customizations, so heads up in case there's an outage again! There hopefully shouldn't be any issues this time but you may get a few errors.

We ran into some issues trying to update and merge everything, and it is also very much 5 am, so our custom themes and character limit will be missing for a little while longer. Hopefully we've fixed what was going wrong and we can get that done tomorrow.

We had to overwrite some files in order to update properly so your themes will be missing for a little while and the character limit temporarily reverted. This should be fixed soon!

We're still trying to figure out the source of the errors people have been getting. There may be some more errors or brief outages as we try to update some things, but hopefully we should be able to fix the issue soon.

I know everyone is enjoying the new character limit, but please make sure you're CWing anything longer than 500-600 or so characters so as not to stretch the timeline!