EVevil-olive·Apr 16, 2026
there seems to be a significant disconnect between the claims in this press release / blog post and the actual reality if you look at the GitHub repo.
starting from the very first words of the announcement:
> Open-source and self-hostable
meanwhile, the readme [0] has a caveat, added today, about how it's only kinda-sorta self-hostable:
> While we eventually plan to make Thunderbolt fully offline-first, it currently depends on authentication and search functionality (though you can disable search on the integrations screen in the app). You can deploy your own backend with Docker and sign up in order to test it locally.
and if you follow the link to the self-hosting instructions [1] there's another caveat that was added today:
> Under active development — not production ready. Thunderbolt is currently undergoing a security audit and prepar
Read the rest
ing for enterprise production readiness. These deployment paths are provided for evaluation and early testing. Do not use in production environments.
don't tell me it's self-hostable if what you really mean is "you can run it locally for testing".
meanwhile, scroll a bit farther down in the announcement:
> Work seamlessly across devices with native applications for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android
which is repeated on the GitHub readme:
> Available on all major desktop and mobile platforms: web, iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, and Windows.
but as pointed out in [2] this is just flat-out incorrect - there are no release artifacts published, for any platform.
come on Mozilla, you need to be better than this. you have to know your target market is engineers and tech-savvy people who see through this sort of marketing fluff.
if you want to publish an announcement saying "we're working on a thing that will eventually do X, Y, and Z" then that's great.
if you want to release something that does X, Y, and Z, that's great too.
but don't over-promise and under-deliver. don't make an announcement that this thing can do X, Y, and Z and then "clarify" that the plan is to eventually do X, Y, and Z.
0: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt?tab=readme-ov-fil...
1: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/deploy/...
2: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/issues/611