After Radio Silence, Kbin App Artemis Shuts Down
After a long silence from the developer, project moderators stepped down. The mobile app for Kbin appears to have closed its doors.
Artemis was a promising mobile app for Kbin, with a dedicated community, a rapid pace of development, and a high level of polish. Then, the developer disappeared.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.