Before I get into my comments, I just want to ask that if you haven’t bought the dev a coffee, please buy him a coffee. Personally, I have bought several with the intent of covering for those who cannot. Our dev has earned it.
I am just going to say that Connect is awesome. Even through early development, when there were huge issues, it progressed at a good pace. And yeah, it has gotten super stable and functions great as a simple and easy to use Lemmy client.
I would also like to make clear that I respect this app as the sole devs creation. He/She is 100% able to direct this project as they see fit. Period.
However. One person development teams can be a serious risk to the longevity and stability of an app. People get tired and burned out. People have actual lives outside of working on a single app. People can just vanish from dev work. That is all normal.
With the recent Lemmy instance updates and some subtle bugs that are showing, my concern is that it may become a much larger challenge to keep this app up to date. In my limited dev experience, core API changes (or API bugs) are a royal pain in the ass to deal with. A person could spend more time just keeping their app functional instead of developing new features or working on minor bugs.
I was hoping that people in this community that have experience with the development of large open source projects, can contribute ideas for our dev that may make it palatable to open this project up to additional contributors.
I think the biggest things I would like to call out is that if this project is opened, it may damage any revenue that is being generated by this app for the dev and I don’t want to see that happen. (People gotta work and people gotta eat. )
What open source licenses are available that would keep full control of this app in the hands of the original dev? (Is that even a viable option?)
Quite simply, other than opening this app up fully, I don’t quite know exactly what I am asking for. It would be nice to keep full control of this app in the hands of the dev, while also allowing community development.
Just to reiterate, this post is not meant to be rude or pushy. If anything I said came off that way, it was absolutely not the intent and offer a humble apology if it did.
I remember the developer mentioned something about this once, and I had to scroll way to far back to find it: https://lemmy.ca/comment/1264956
I can totally understand being somewhat insecure about your code, or have the feeling that you need to do this/this/that before you can publish it online. And indeed dealing with an issue tracker, pull request that people expect you to review, forks of your code being published elsewhere, finding and trusting other developers to commit directly to your project can feel stressful. Disabling issues and pull request on GitHub could resolve some of these issues.
Connect is a fantastic app, and still my favourite lemmy client. I hope it will continue to work en be great for a long time. And most importantly that the developers still has fun working on the project.
Being turned into a development manager doesn’t sound like fun, TBH. Over the years, I have watched quite a few projects suffer because of developer drama and that would suck.
Sometimes, open source just isn’t the answer and it’s why I am trying to start a discussion around that. Maybe if a super senior android dev were to volunteer, that could be an option? I dunno.