This is why I never build any of my app ideas. I don't want people to notice when I wake up one day and decide I don't want to work on it anymore. Of course people tend to not like my UX ideas so its probably a fear I don't need to have.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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I thought this was one of the points of open source.
"Yeah, I'm done with this. I'm not making any more changes from what it is today. If you find value in continuing it, here's the code. Go wild!"
Yes, but if you're lucky maybe 1 in 100,000 users will be both capable and willing to take up the reins. More often than not, when single (principal) developer projects lose its single developer the project just goes into code rot. ASF maintains tons of projects that are too valuable to lose completely but which have no one doing active development on them. It's a problem.
It’s a problem.
Its a DIFFERENT problem.
OP is talking about never creating because of fear of maintaining. How many good ideas have never come to anything because of this idea?
Yes, but if you’re lucky maybe 1 in 100,000 users will be both capable and willing to take up the reins
So? You as the original developer actively wanted to get away from it, don't care what happens to it afterwards.
I've never not cared about my code. And If I didn't care about users depending on it I'd feel like a monster.
I love the way of describing Free Software. Paraphrasing and I don't recall the source: "Not free as in speech or free as in beer. Free as in puppies." You can get a puppy for free but then you have to take care of it all the time, and it incurs costs like vet visits. Free Software can be the same way.
This. Nothing is more difficult than understanding someone's else code and architecture, and even if you manage that, you're now stucked with the choices somebody else made and nobody wants that (we want to make our terrible choices!).
More than a final app, the best thing to publish as FOSS is libraries extracted from it to help other developers build there own products faster. That's something other may want to maintain when we abandon it. And on top of that, it still help to publish your app using this lib to serve as practical example about how to use your it, of course.
Not sure what ASF is (something Software Foundation?) but sounds like they are a solution and not a problem
Apache. The problem is there is foundational software in the world that is aging and not being actively maintained. Basically they jump into action when someone catches a security issue, but also that way too many of those security issues only get found when they're being actively exploited. Even if it's being used by your bank.
I recall reading about a university ?compsci? lab where the professor who leads it assigns her students to examine priority dependency chains. They trace everything back and report on who is maintaining various upstream packages, and identify situations where it is like just one person or otherwise really vulnerable. Then they have some sort of institutional resources to offer that person support and add extra hands to the workflow. So it is more proactive than what you are describing in that they are going out and looking for things that could be problems, not just awaiting a disastrous exploit and patching it up after the fact.
But it's just some small group somewhere. On the main I think we agree on the deficit of support for FLOSS components and applications that functionally run the whole world. It's so crazy but invisible. I am not a developer, just a fan of developers and their work. Most people I know IRL are not developers. Everyone thinks the software on their phone works because Apple and Google pay engineers to build everything. They don't know about all the FLOSS components to the phone, the services it uses, the network etc, and how so many bits and pieces are maintained in part or in whole by volunteers on their free time.
Remember when the boat got stuck in the panama canal and everyone was suddenly interested in supply chains? I forsee/fear the event that prompts the whole world to learn about dependency chains.
Remember when the boat got stuck in the panama canal and everyone was suddenly interested in supply chains?
That was the Suez Canal lol
omg i stand corrected
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Suez_Canal_obstruction
also it only lasted 1 week?? i felt like it was 9 months long
TODO: read the wikipedia beyond the introduction
yes axactly
I can think of only one concrete example where the lead dev walked away - rightfully IIRC - and the community was able to pick it up, fork it, and actually maintain and continue to develop new features.
Sadly, that’s not often the case.
I think youtube-dl had a situation like that, now yt-dlp. (except I don't know if the original dev's status is confirmed?)
also exa, now forked to eza. My impression is for this case, the original dev is OK.
But honestly I have encountered lots of software packages which have been dropped and picked up in this way. Man pages can contain history like this, occasionally going back to the 80s or even 70s for the basics. The main problem is that the original software package is so well known and sometimes it's hard to find out about the newer iterations so they have a difficult time picking up steam. I used to have a bookmarklet that would show forks on github sorted by activity; occasionally this allowed finding the more recently-developed project. But more likely you have to wait to stumble on it in a forum.
That's why I open-source everything I work on, or at least, everything I have permission to. I have one or two projects where I have friends who have contributed a good amount of code but don't want it public so I respect their wishes and keep it private. Everything else I work on though, it's open-source.
If I can't or won't continue working on something, maybe someone else can find it useful and continue working on it.
Of course people tend to not like my UX ideas so its probably a fear I don’t need to have.
Same 😂 My UIs can cause blind rage
If your project open source then you can do it, and give it to maintainers or someone else, or let anyone work it. Life can get busy for everyone
In an ironic twist of fate, Artemis was stopped in its tracks because the source code hasn’t been released
Oh no, nobody could have seen this coming... 🙄 And people kept downvoting me when I scoff at a release of closed source Lemmy/Mastodon/... clients.
For all intents and purposes, the dev did state their intentions on releasing the code "when it's ready", and was super active in working on it. Not releasing, and relying on one server running a specific upstream branch were definitely mistakes, 100%. But, I think the dev legitimately believed they would hit that target, which was a prerequisite for releasing.
I never understood the "when it's ready" excuse. It's only not ready when it contains stolen code, otherwise as unstable as the application may be, the code is ready for release.
So much this! If people are worried about contributions arriving before things are cleaned, then just put a huge ass headline on the README saying:
CURRENTLY NOT ACCEPTING PULL REQUESTS
pls and thank you
Kbin didn't haven't an API so they were using screen scrapers. I assumed they were waiting for a proper API rollout. But who knows now.
Yeah, they apparently used scrapers for a while, but it's obviously not a very performant way to do things. Artemis Camp was launched with an upstream branch that introduced API work, and the app was adjusted to use that as a playground.
Right? Like, my app is definitely not ready yet its source code is available for all to see. And since I'm currently inactive, you could even fork it and get a bigger following than me if you wanted to.
These people just think too highly of themselves.
This also highlights how important it is that we develop open source apps for the fediverse. Life is hard, busy, and surprising. An open source license works for the good of all of us by allowing development to continue in the face of hardship.
And also the importance of APIs. It's the only reason why there's so many Lemmy clients compared to Kbin.
That's a bit concerning. Leave alone the bad practices of multiple single points of failure (single server, single developer, singler person with access to code), the abrupt silence from the developer Harriette looks very concerning. Hopefully we hear back from her soon enough.
Developing alternative frontends like Artemis at this stage of Kbin development is really putting the cart before the horse. Compared to Lemmy, kbin is much more different than reddit due to is micro blogging capabilities and other Mastodon-like feature, such as boosts, that it is difficult to straight up port a reddit app to Kbin. Development wise, Lemmy is also much more mature, as the backend was already separated from the frontend and Jerboa exist as a reference app, where as far as I can tell, Kbin didn't have a reference app, or even a backend API at the time.
I'm not a programmer, but it seems to me, in retrospect, that the wise thing for Hariette to do is to join the Kbin dev team, contribute to the main repo, and make Artemis the reference Kbin app instead striking out on her own on a custom implementation and running her own instance at the same time. It's sad that she appears to be burnt out right now.
Oh damn. I have the beta on my phone but haven’t really used it since I’m not on kbin. I was waiting for it to be compatible with lemmy. Too bad because it has a very nice looking and smooth interface and it seemed very promising. Adios to the app on my phone I guess.
Yes, the whole thing is especially frustrating because the app was quite nice. Harriette did a really good job really quickly.
That's too bad, that is the main thing I feel kbin could use is a good app. The web app seems a bit hit or miss.
Yeah it's a real shame because from what I saw of the Artemis app it looked good as well. I hope the dev is ok.
Kbin definitely needs a decent app. The web app does the job but it can be a bit irritating as you say
Oh man, this is a real bummer. I was really hopeful for Artemis. Hopefully Harriette's doing okay, though.
On the flip side, Ernest said he'd resume working on the official mobile client soon.
This is unfortunate. Artemis is beautiful and a good app. I hope that the dev is okay. Hopefully, she can return or make the code openly available.
That's a shame, there seem to be a lot of options for mobile apps on Lemmy but not on kbin. Maybe it's okay though because their web interface is pretty good. I've been using it on mobile and it works well enough. Scales well to various sizes.
Perhaps once the API is mature there will be more apps and developers, provided the user base is there.
That's one more reason why open source is a way to go. You can never know if you'll get in a though life situation for example.
Your last line reminds me of the avatar intro. I guess the developer pulled an aang on us.
I'm using a mobile web interface for kbin access from the Firefox browser on my XR.