The last message before closing the old community stated that, after a break, it would be decided whether to restart from an existing fork or to recreate a repository in an anonymous account. We have decided to do both things, taking the most active fork (which was updated to the latest commit), transferring it to a neutral organization and using that as a starting point.
The biggest limit of the previous approach, as emerged on August 1st, was that even if the app was presented as a “community project”, its ownership and all the decision making process (as well as the majority of the development heavy-lifting) was concentrated in the hands of a single person, which could take questionable decisions due to personal contingencies. Being a human and having a single point of view, errors can be made and reactions can be disproportionate with respect to their causes.
In order to prevent this from happening again, the new organization will have a more open, transparent and community-driven approach, and everyone will have to participate more in the decision making process, so that ownership is shared as well as responsibility.
The new repository will be available here and we are working to restore everything so that a new development release will be available soon and can be installed from GitHub (in order to have a new Google Play account more time will be needed).
Moreover, in order to make sure everyone’s voice is listened to, there will be periodic AMA sessions once a month in this very community, using the [AMA] prefix in the post title. The session will be held the first Wednesday of each month, so the day after tomorrow will be the first one.
We hope you are convinced that mistakes like last week’s one will not happen again and you’ll participate in this new stage of the journey.
I don’t understand why the original developer abandoned such good work after getting constructive criticism about the markdown feature as the other lemmy third-party apps also received.
The improvement in Markdown rendering was even planned, since the “Enable experimental Markdown rendering” option had been added in the Settings screen in debug builds here.
Some comments about the app being last in the benchmark, and about all other apps having scored better made him think his reputation as a developer could be damaged in the real world, so he asked the package name to be changed as done here and here and to use an anonymous GitHub account.
Whenever things are ranked, something will be in last place. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is bad, especially as they were being judged specifically on markdown, not as apps overall.
Glad to see that the project will continue!