Do not start baseless theories like this. Nothing points at anything nefarious targeting users here (see below). I personally am just hoping that Catfriend1 is doing fine. Just in case you are reading this and as it bears repeating: Thanks for being part of this community and all the work you put into the app!
Now as a user I’d suggest as we German-speakers would say “Abwarten und Tee trinken” (wait and see I guess?), it’s not like the app stopped working or anything. If you wanna get involved, I think it’s quite evident what needs doing - probably worth coordinating with others (e.g. maybe @nel0x ) before jumping to action (though too many volunteers wasn’t an issue so far).
As to why I consider these “baseless theories”:
Battery issues exist as long as the app exists. And v2 was a big change that plausibly could trigger actual technical weirdness or just as likely simply rattled lots of users that suddenly start paying attention and seeing issues.
All associated accounts I saw so far look either deleted or taken private, this is not the MO of an account breach and a zero risk situation: If something nefarious would be going on, it wouldn’t be in your face like this, it would be silence and updates as usual. Also you know, the app is open - you can check (and some here have already done that for recent changes apparently - thanks @katedickey for that and the pointer at the source for the last changes! ).
I very much suspect this is just a question of waking up one morning, seeing too many bug reports and too much negativity, and thinking to oneself “Supposedly I do this for fun, this isn’t fun any more, so fuck this”. God knows I’ve been there myself quite a few times. As a single maintainer there isn’t much of a support network. Maybe they’ll be back, maybe they won’t. In any case they owe us nothing in terms of explanation; if there are people who want to take on the job of continuing the development and maintenance, why not get together and do that. If Catfriend1 comes back, I’m sure they’ll be happy to see it and perhaps join in. If they don’t, we can just thank them for their service so far and move on with life.
I sincerely hope catfriend1 comes bac when he feels like it. His work was priceless and incredibly good, it’s thanks to him that my android devices can seamlessly sync, he worked out a lot of things and right now i feel the app is “perfect” (if such thing can exist in this life).
If he feels a lot of people have been abusive or toxic, he should absolutely take his time to relax and, possibly, tell them to simply go touch grass and never touch an electric device again. (or a more emphatic and sincerely satisfying thing)
Said that, I hope he’s well!! Best of wishes @catfriend1 !!
I’ve never used Liberapay, but I Github Sponsor a couple of projects I use. I’d be happy to Github sponsor syncthing-fork, but I can’t seem to find a way to do so.
I only just found syncthing-fork as I’m migrating from Android to GrapheneOS and from Windows to Linux. I’ve deeply appreciated @Catfriend1 work, and hope that they’re okay.
@calmh something to keep in mind depending on where this goes: With the new redirects, https://syncthing.net/downloads/ effectively links to https://github.com/researchxxl/syncthing-android and https://github.com/researchxxl/syncthing-lite now, both repos on an account that is 2 days old, without any explanation yet.
Not to rush anything, just not something to forget about.
Yeah, I’m aware. I figure we’ll give this a few days to come to some sort of conclusion. At the moment the contents of the repo seem kosher so I’m not particularly worried about any ill effects for regular users.
tl;dr: It’s not the same person, the repo was transferred to them including signing key (could not find reason), invited @nel0x to collaborate, researchxxl (the 2 days old account) suggested using their new repo for f-droid and Google Play AFAICS
there wasn’t anything exotic. Catfriend was on the lookout for a successor and I already knew him from another OSS project they did a while ago. we agreed and I was asked to create a new account after I got keys and creds to their original account. it turned out to be a bad idea to reuse their name so I created a new one.
) before jumping to action (though too many volunteers wasn’t an issue so far).
