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 [] 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.
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 @akesi_seli@lemmy.world 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.