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That's very unfortunate. Open source development can seem like a thankless job sometimes... you start out building something because it's fun, or you want to challenge yourself, or learn something new... and then other ppl start making demands, those start to pile on, and it quickly becomes a stressful job.
Sorry to see that app go, it had a lot of potential.
The developer of Raccoon actually liked receiving feedback and constructive criticism, most of the issues reported had been solved it no time.
The main reason for the takedown was that, using his real name and surname, his reputation as a professional developer was being damaged by people crying that 4.1/10 for Markdown sucked, that it was the app with the lowest score ever, etc.
Seeing real damage and real losses in your personal life (for something you do as a volunteer) was probably perceived as a betrayal.
Yup people can be vicious even when somethings totally free, it's horrible.
It definitely had potential. Was my main driver for Lemmy. It had the best layout of posts, modern and sleek handling, etc. Markdown worked just fine for me. The minor bugs I noticed didn't bother me much. Am sad to see it implode like this... hope the dev will change his mind or someone will pick up the pieces.
Yup people can be vicious even when somethings totally free, it's horrible.
It has already happened with Artemis last year. It will continue happening but it's how FOSS works.
Luckily there are other apps available, and the developer of Raccoon always said his project was experimental and did not intend to replace any of the more well established apps.
One of his mottos was "when im doubt, look at Jerboa for Lemmy".
Hopefully he can read your comment about potential of Raccoon and change his mind. If it wasn't for you and others that got together and did something none of us would be here right now.
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
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.
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
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.
I can confirm that it felt more or less like that 😓
do they think only bad devs create bugs? it's part of programming.
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.
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 </>>
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!
This fork is updated with the latest changes by the original developer:
https://github.com/N7-X/RaccoonForLemmy
plus its maintainer has started new developments and adjustments.
Good news
Good catch. I will keep an eye out for it. Let's see what the dev does with that and how much dedication will go into it.
That's concerning. I'm typing this through Raccoon right now. Awesome client.
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.
Someone on Lemmy did a markdown test of all existing Lemmy apps and posted the results. Raccoon was one of the worst performers, and after seeing the results the dev went nuclear.
Here’s a comment on the original post talking about it. I think the thread’s OP ended up removing Raccoon from their results but the damage was already done.
Just to add that it was the worst performer because the tester made some mistake when doing said markdown test. When he corrected the test it was nowhere near the worst, but it was already to late.
Some people (tester included) tried to reason with the dev, but to no avail. I think he was scared because he was using his real name in github, and didn't want to have bad code in his résumé or something like that.
IMHO, the dev overreacted. But it's his project so it's is decision.
Some people forked the project before it went down, so maybe we can see a comeback in the future.
Raccoon was being pushed a lot on my instance, because the dev is Italian I think... Now I'm thankful I didn't switch
I was using it has my main Lemmy client, but no big deal. Fortunately there's a lot of clients to choose from.
The dev for Raccoon also had a Lemmy community to announce updates and things (he also deleted that community). Before he deleted it, he said that post about markdown support was the last straw and he was done with it. He announced he was going to delete everything related to Raccoon and it was all gone within like 12 hours of him saying that. He said any of the forks of his app can continue development, but since he deleted the entire repo with very little warning I don't know if any of those forks were current with the latest commit before the parent repo disappeared.
Isn't it GPL? Someone could request the code of the last release
No need for that, because it has been forked and at least one fork was updated to the last commit.
BTW, only 2 people (besides the dev) in over one year submitted some line of code, it would be quite ironic that only after the original project has been shut down people start to be willing to contribute.
It's like willing to feed someone who has just been starved to death.
This is sad. I really like the app!
What's everyone using instead?
Thunder is great
Thunder is by far the best FOSS app for lemmy, it's like a lite Sync without all the ads bullshit.
Is it still being actively developed? I ditched it a while back because it seemed to have been abandoned It hadn't received any activity for several months and was working really janky.
The last commit was two days ago and the last update was two months ago (at least for me on Android).
+1 for voyager. I like other apps too but voyager has felt like a fresh breeze.
I always keep Jerboa on as well. A solid "alternative" (1) and the client most unlikely to get abandoned.
Voyager here. Thunder is my second, but there is a bug that the previews are not loading right. Voyager fells like a better experience right now.
Never tried Raccoon but I've been fond of Connect.
I like sync and haven't felt the need to try anything else since I first joined Lemmy.
I briefly used Jerboa & connect but they just weren't as polished—things have very likely moved on, but I'm happy where I am so I've not checked
I have been liking Boost because it has a nice tablet app!
update: we have decided to continue the project starting from the latest active fork and re-create a new community here.
Racoon is what I came to after Liftoff died.
Take this object, [new Lemmy client app] but beware it carries a terrible curse...
...But it comes with a free Frogurt!
I found this, maybe a fork by someone? https://www.lemmyapps.com/app/details/33 The github link is alive btw