After Radio Silence, Kbin App Artemis Shuts Down : fediverse

[+] [email protected] 102 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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!"

[+] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not sure what ASF is (something Software Foundation?) but sounds like they are a solution and not a problem

[+] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Relevant xkcd

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Remember when the boat got stuck in the panama canal and everyone was suddenly interested in supply chains?

That was the Suez Canal lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

yes axactly

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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.

[+] [email protected] 47 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

And also the importance of APIs. It's the only reason why there's so many Lemmy clients compared to Kbin.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago

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.

[+] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Yes, the whole thing is especially frustrating because the app was quite nice. Harriette did a really good job really quickly.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

Oh man, this is a real bummer. I was really hopeful for Artemis. Hopefully Harriette's doing okay, though.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

On the flip side, Ernest said he'd resume working on the official mobile client soon.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Your last line reminds me of the avatar intro. I guess the developer pulled an aang on us.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

I'm using a mobile web interface for kbin access from the Firefox browser on my XR.

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CURRENTLY NOT ACCEPTING PULL REQUESTS