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.
It is nice to know that we will still have the app. Thanks for everyone who has decided to continue the excellent work done by the original developer.
No offense, but your account is one day old, and https://github.com/LiveFastEatTrashRaccoon is brand new.
Can you provide any credibility around this account/repo ownership? Especially in the aftermath of XZ Utils backdoor
I’m not one for the spotlight (which is why I opted out of this initial announcement!) but this is a really good point, so I wanted to chime in.
As @[email protected] pointed out, this is my fork from while I was actively contributing to the project with the original dev. You can verify this by navigating to https://www.github.com/n7-x/RaccoonForLemmy and see that it goes directly to the new repository, and also when looking at the 1,604 commits you can see they are all from the original repo + our new additions.
Again, I think this is a very valid concern, and I’m glad you voiced it. There really should be some skepticism when it comes to code, and lucky for us, open source actually allows us to verify that.
Part of why I love FOSS so much ♥️Thanks! If you endorse this forks’ ownership/ongoing development, then I am satisfied.
That means a lot, thanks!
Since I am also continuing to be a contributor to this version, I’m planning to be more active in the community, so you’ll all probably see me around a bit more!
The repository N7-X is a fork of the original one, you can then see what we did since August 1st here. We did not change any binary images except the static assets of the
README.mdfile (which is not shipped in the app packages, it’s just a documentation file).I can think of a very good reason why a brand new account would be extremely knowledgeable and passionate about this project. Especially considering the previous dev account specifically mentioned wanting more anonymity.
Just a theory.
That wouldn’t be a bad thing in any case would it?
Of course not. I think it’s fantastic. I’m very grateful that you will be carrying on this project.
I’m also working on updating that, and I’ll be sure to include raccoon! It will also be added back to the Lemmy Apps directory and submitted to LemmyApps.com
Although if anyone else wants to do any of that I think it’s a great idea! It will be a couple of days at least before I can.
Have my star and LW Lemmy Silver for this great contribution
Please have it sync the lemmy markdown. (especially spoilers)
Spoilers are supported (but not nested ones) unless they contain complex items like lists, in which case itemization is removed in the sanitization stage.
Anyway we’ll continue improving the rendering in future pull requests.
Will you release it into fdroid?
If the project gains adoption, we can hope to have it on IzzyOnDroid. As for F-Droid, there have been several issues with reproducible builds, but technically the ones related to l10n resources had been solved. It could be worth trying again.
I will wait to install it from fdroid, thank you a lot for your work reviving this amazing lemmy client.
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.
Some comments about the app being last in the benchmark, and about all other apps having scored better
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!
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Yes, actually it is Kotlin Multiplatform app where the UI layer is implemented with Compose Multiplatform (which is in alpha for iOS), and there were some major issues (e.g. in videos) so the iOS counterpart was never released.
