I can only report from my exchanges with @Catfriend1 around the time of the last repository reset. There were good reasons for him wanting to take action, although the measures taken were too drastic, disruptive and pointless in the end. I didn’t learn more details about what really happened, only some bits. It must have been an emotionally challenging situation caused by other peoples’ hostile behavior. Trying to hide something contained in the repository history led to a complete rewrite of commit history. I advised against it, as it would cause more attention actually, instead of silently discarding sensitive information, because Git is just designed to provide the opposite: maximum transparency and exact accountability of history. That led to his decision to instead dump the history (and complete repository) and restart with a clean slate, including only a few recent releases. Nothing fishy going on at that time, just a bit bumpy way of handling the measures he deemed necessary to protect himself from harm.
I just hope that @Catfriend1 is alright and the disappearance / absence of his digital identity does protect him from whatever or whoever was pressuring him enough to take these drastic actions. We really need to be thankful for all the work poured into the app and even the revival of the Syncthing-Lite app effort.
As for the current situation, we can only assume that whatever was pressuring him finally got too much. Whether it is a legitimate handover, a digital identity restart or some form of forced takeover, we should ask ourselves whether the motivation for this decision could have been caused by some malicious actor posing an actual threat to @Catfriend1. If that were the case, the same force could be behind the researchxxl identity, trying to gain control over the Syncthing-Fork app in order to attack some individuals’ data. The latter would be rather hard to pull off, as there is no hiding features in open source apps. But as only few people really do follow changes to the source code and many rely on automatic updates, there is a good chance of success to deliver backdoors to less careful users.
Considering the possibility of a malicious force behind the takeover, for sure they would be doing a terrible job at it. Communicating and trying to gain people’s trust would be the most important step for protecting that investment. In that sense, the lack of communication is actually a good sign right now, because it indicates clumsiness or disinterest in building trust, instead of an intricate strategy to undermine the app’s integrity.
This is the point where a clean restart of the distribution channels seems appropriate. Nobody should get an automatic update of the app, which is clearly not a continuation of @Catfriend1’s effort, but must be considered an independent contribution by someone else, where each user needs to evaluate from scratch how much that contribution can be trusted.