After the two major Cydia Hosts shut down, iFans would have many questions about that. So the maintainer of theBigBoss repo is trying to give some answers. Here are the answers from him.

What happened to Modmyi/ZodTTD/MacCiti repos?

These repo hosts have made perhaps difficult decisions in order to cut losses. As a matter of economics, keeping a repo afloat with its various costs through a prolonged period of uncertainty is a difficult ask. The jailbreak ecosystem is suffering right now and some changes were probably inevitable. For example, Modmy was recently acquired by Mobile Nations, and was eager to complete a renovation/reinvigorate the repo portion of the business, but the economic prospects at this time make that a very tough sell.

What about all those hosted packages?

Through some organized efforts, saurik has archived the entirety of those repos and their packages and will be serving them indefinitely for all cydia users. For most users this change that's happened wont even be noticed - in fact it happened already over a week ago. You will continue to have access to any purchases made there too, and you will be able to purchase any archived item.

Do we need to replace these repos?

In reality, the trends have been down more than most realize. The repo has been publishing on average lately more than 10x the number of packages that the other repos had. But on the whole these figures are down to perhaps less than a quarter than this time 2 or more years ago. There isn't enough volume of stuff being made anymore, that my one repo can't handle the throughput, in theory. What is being made of late is increasingly more commercial items versus free. It's not always intuitive, but if you think critically about it: commercial items are essentially fated to be relatively niche items. That nichiness compounds the issues, as niche items don't really help pay the bills. The scales are tipped far in that direction now, and frankly more often than not, newcomers are eager to participate in the commercial side without giving much thought to the free side. Kudos to every maker still left out there producing quality free items.

What about TheBigBoss repo?

Times are tough no doubt, and all the repos are affected; our ad-supported business model may not be ideal but it's taken us far. The BigBoss repo will continue business as normal, until that's no longer a business that works. The maintainer plans to keep the community fully apprised should something serious happen to those plans, but the future is sort of unknown really. He will keep working closely with saurik, as we have throughout this transition.

What about updating stuff on the older repos?

If you're a developer or a maker with an update you want applied to one of those archived repo items, you can submit it to theBigBoss repo and they can seamlessly provide an update to your users.

Are there any repos hosting themes now?

In short: the maintainer will. The default repos had grown into a convenient relationship. His sanity was salvaged by stopping working with theme makers several years ago, knowing he could pass them along to the other repos. MacCiti was a theme specialist for example. This worked fine but that's no longer in the cards, and theme makers still need an outlet with fair visibility I think. So as difficult as it is to imagine, the maintainer is going to return to the older days of accepting themes at the repo. More info on that soon, but for now you can use our lowly submission forms on the website.

Is jailbreaking dying?

From the maintainer, "These are some really uncertain times. The promise of a next season seems far away, but there's always some inkling of hope. Frankly, I see the signs pointing downwards, and to be honest I've been advising developers and makers to seriously think about taking their skills and making them portable, possibly leading into the next big hobby or line of profession. There are some transferable skills from tweak making and theme making, of course. Given what we know about the trends now it would seem foolish to not consider an outlook that is for some their worst-fears. It's not as bad as all that, so let's not panic just yet. Repos have been archived and all still going just as before, in a lot of respects."

Source: 0ptimo [Reddit]