The maker people I know have been migrating away from Tindie because it has felt like a sinking ship for a long time.

I really like the idea of Tindie so I hope they can succeed. I don’t understand what sequence of events led to this being such a large problem that they can’t even keep their site online. The post says something vague about the engineering team is hoping the migration work is close to finished, but it’s been years since I remember any engineering team knocking out the entire site for days without being able to restore it during a failed migration. Are they outsourcing dev work to the type of agency that bills by the hour and perpetually churns low hourly cost work to make their money in volume fixing their own code?

You have to wonder why it's so hard to put that on their 503 error page. I suspect something's much more broken than they're letting on.