After living with a terminal diagnosis for a long time — and continuing to be their wonderful self despite it — I'm sad to share that our dear friend Cinnamon died yesterday.

Among many other things, Cinnamon was the creator and guiding hand of Earthstar. We became friends after I began contributing to the project, and that friendship blossomed into that rare and joyous overlapping of friendship and working together on something you both deeply care about. It was everything you could hope working on open source together could be.

Cinnamon was a deep, methodical, caring person, whose work always put the happiness and safety of others first. They're someone who I'll always remember for their fastidious, loving attention to detail; and how they could lightly step back and see the problem as a whole, never losing track of why they were doing what they doing. This total awareness was the source of their unique contributions to the p2p and decentralised space, from their contributions to SSB (e.g. Oasis), Cabal, and eventually Earthstar.

Our friendship was entirely online. I have so many happy memories of video calls in the evenings, wrangling tangled threads of new ideas together, putting new plans in motion, and just chatting until late. Turns out the internet can be great. Due to covid we were never able to meet in the flesh, but I managed to get a few letters and cards to them. I was happy that they could have something in their hands that had once been in mine.

It isn't often you get to meet someone who is both a friend and a mentor. That is who Cinnamon was to me, and I can't tell you how much I'm going to miss them.

Goodbye, my friend, and thank you!