The Slow Collapse of MkDocs

Summary

On March 9, 2026, one of the former maintainers of MkDocs took over control of the PyPI repository and removed the rights of the original author. The original author quickly responded: What the actual fuck? I’m the author and license holder. @lovelydinosaur · Mar 9, 2026 Now please revert the PyPI changes and fuck off. @lovelydinosaur · Mar 9, 2026 They then regained control of the PyPI repository by filing a PyPI support ticket. MkDocs powers documentation for over 90,000 GitHub projects, and most of them depend on Material for MkDocs, a theme by @squidfunk so popular it has more stars than MkDocs itself. But the PyPI takeover was just the most visible symptom of a deeper problem. Anyone who uses Material for MkDocs today gets the following warning displayed in their terminal: │ ⚠ WARNING – MkDocs 2.0 is incompatible with Material for MkDocs │ │ MkDocs 2.0 introduces backward-incompatible changes: │ │ [...] MkDocs has not seen any real development for over 18 months. Material for MkDocs is in maintenance mode. And where there were once two dominant tools working together, there are now several competing to replace them: ProperDocs, MaterialX (“the next generation of mkdocs-material”), and Zensical (“A modern static site generator built by the creators of Material for MkDocs”). How did we end up here? To understand the full story, we need to go back in time a little bit… Jan 11, 2014 The birth of MkDocs On January 11, 2014, Mia Kimberly Christie (@lovelydinosaur) pushes the first commit to what would become MkDocs, with the message “Hell yeah”. A flurry of commits follow in the next few months.The burst of activity doesn’t last very long. By mid-2014, their activity in the repo stops completely.Others join the project, like @d0ugal and @waylan. @lovelydinosaur remains inactive, and for the period between July 2016 and July 2021 @waylan seems to be the sole maintainer of the project.The project becomes more and more popular, and by mid-2022 the project accumulates we...