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Edit 1: After I made this post I looked for the app everywhere, turns out the developer removed it from Fdroid and Google Play Store and even deleted the community.

I guess the client is done.

  • @[email protected]English
    39•5 months ago

    Everything has been deleted, it sucks. Here is the main post from @[email protected] I saved before it was deleted.

    Post Title: [announcement] this is officially the worst Lemmy app (at least for Markdown rendering)

    Body:

    Today, during lunch break, I was surprised to find a couple of notifications in by inbox, and I saw I had been mentioned in a some comments to this post in [email protected]. Like it or not, this is a piece of news which can not and should not be ignored.

    Here are a couple of considerations about it:

    • Markdown rendering has never been a priority for this app, so less frequent features like strikethrough, superscript, subscripts, footnotes, tables, etc. are known to not be rendered well or supported at all, given that the library we are using does not support them either, and it is not thought to be customized easily (even for the simplest things like images and spoilers). I’ve had a talk with the maintainer of this library but he’s some random guy who happens to maintain it in his spare time and no support could be expected;
    • this project was born as an experimentation, it is clearly stated in the README. md and the technologies it is built upon (Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform) are not mature, non entirely production ready and ever evolving; which is something I enjoyed because it challenges me to keep learning, but again there are compromises to accept;
    • 1, as well as all those who contributed so far with code/translations/artwork, have been working to this in our spare time, with no compensation, no formal commitment and no quality of service to guarantee whatsoever;
    • the benchmark took into consideration just one aspect and not the totality of the features each application offers; it considered a limited set of apps (why were some included and some others were not); and the criteria on how points were assigned were not clear at to the time of writing they have not been disclosed yet.

    Those who have seen my approach to this project, either because they have collaborated or because they have submitted feedback, know that I try to do my best to create a “decent” client for Lemmy, that I try to address everyone’s issues and and make everyone feel important and feel at home in a friendly environment, as well as that I have not been hiding behind a nickname and have put my real face and my real name in my software, because I believe you should trust the people who write the code that runs on your devices.

    I find myself in a very uncomfortable situation right now because, after revealing my personal information as the project owner, the current circumstances create a real damage to my public image as a professional and as a person. My coworkers, my managers, my employers (current and future) can see all of this and my personal reputation is compromised.

    At the moment, I think I need some time to decide what to do. The most likely option would be to delete the repository, unpublish the app from the stores, and hope that, in the future, some of the forks people made in the past can be used to create something better in the future. Another option would be that the project continues but with a different leadership and no association to any personal account.

    In the meantime, I want to thank one last time all those who contributed so far with code commits, translations, artwork, bug reports, suggestions, feedback and encouragement. It has been a pleasant journey the one we travelled together.

    As always: Live Fast Eat Trash

    • RBG
      35•5 months ago

      While I respect the decision the dude made, anyone should always be able to back out of an open source project, I also absolutely do not understand the reasoning.

      The markdown challenge was in no way a ranking of how good or bad Lemmy apps are. It just said, “hey look, this type of formatting isn’t shown correctly in some apps”.

      How did the dev even deal with other bug reports? If other stuff didn’t work correctly, how was that then not a “bad reputation” for him? I am totally confused by this.

      • g20to
        16•5 months ago

        from de goodbye post by the dev of Raccoon for Lemmy:

        Different apps are built with different technologies: Jerboa uses Markwon for Markdown rendering, Raccoon uses multiplatform-markdown-renderer, Thunder uses flutter_markdown, etc.

        You are not comparing the apps, you are comparing the rendering libraries we (apps’ developers) did not even write ourselves.

        App was being judged for the 3rd party library that was implemented

        Your question:

        How did the dev even deal with other bug reports?

        Very well, it was faster than The Concorde, everyone that ever contacted him can confirm that right away

        • @voracreadEnglish
          3•5 months ago

          The last part is the most sad part, I felt he really loved working on it. It must have felt like cutting off an arm for him to let it go.

      • AmbiguousPropsEnglish
        12•5 months ago

        do they think only bad devs create bugs? it’s part of programming.

      • Max-P
        10•5 months ago

        The reputation argument is so weird to me, it’s free work for no compensation, to experiment and learn new things. That’s personal development and going beyond doing the minimum (of not making an app at all), that’s usually good reputation points.

        Unless the code is in really bad shape, it’s just unfinished which is very understandable given it’s free software made in free time. One could make the argument they were likely properly prioritizing their day job as well.

        I have my share of unfinished of abandoned projects and it never even once came up in an interview. And when I’m the interviewer, I’m more interested in why they started it, and what they learned from it, what they would have done differently, why did they want to use X and Y libraries for it and so on. I have much worse apps in the Play Store right now from places I worked at 10 years ago.

        They deleted everything so I can’t go check but there might be some cultural factors at play there to explain this.

        • Max-P
          5•5 months ago

          As an aside, the app I use (Boost) also scored fairly bad on that test. I still paid for it and still use it. Sure it doesn’t display everything perfectly but Markdown is literally designed to be readable before rendering, you still get the message.

          It’s such a weird thing to flip out on and delete everything for. A simple “hey I don’t have any free time for this anymore” message and archiving the repository would have been just fine, but at least enabled people to fork it and continue it. Clearly this thread’s existence shows people were using it as-is.

          It’s not like the Lemmy ecosystem is top notch, for a couple months Lemmy itself couldn’t even render quotes and apostrophes properly and all posts looked like a mess of ' and " and </>>

    • @[email protected]
      4•5 months ago

      In the second to last paragraph he states there are two possible ways to continue: either some of the forks continues the job, or he will re-publish the app with a different account (and package name).

      The community seems to have chosen the first one, and he will probably respect this decision. Good luck to the forks!