Hi, Mlem App Community.

As many of you have probably already seen, our founder David has left the project. We wanted to take a moment to address this news and any concerns it may cause within our community.

First and foremost, we want to make it unequivocally clear that we harbor no resentment or hard feelings towards David. We understand that he made this choice for his own well-being and support him for it. He was a joy to work with, and without his leadership or vision the Mlem app would not be what it is today or what it will be tomorrow. David, if you’re reading this: we thank you, and wish you all the best.

Development of Mlem will continue. All of us still on the the team remain as engaged and passionate as we were yesterday and continue to work tirelessly to bring you the best Lemmy experience we can. It is no secret, however, that this news was as much of a surprise to us as it was to you all, and it has introduced a couple of hitches in the short term. The GitHub repository where we store our code has been passed to another member of the team, but the App Store app could not be transferred so easily. We will be rebranding our App Store name to “Mlem for Lemmy”; the app will still appear as “Mlem” on your homescreen. As David mentioned, the current TestFlight beta has ended, and we will provide a link to a new one ASAP. The timing of that depends on Apple more than anything, so we cannot provide a concrete timeframe just yet. We’ll keep you posted with links here in this community.

We thank you for your patience, your understanding, and all of your support.

– The Mlem App Team

  • BIFF@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Best wishes and gratitude to David, and thank you for the update!

  • Eric (deprecated)@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    As a dev, I just want to express how much it warms my heart to see how kind and understanding the community’s response to this news has been. You all are the best <3

    • L3s@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I’m not a Mlem user, but are you all worried about how much David contributed, and keeping up with it all? The UI looks the best out of all of the apps I’ve tested (Android user ;[), and seems to be more feature rich.

      • Eric (deprecated)@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        David contributed so much in part because he was working on the project as a personal thing for a long time before any of us came along. That’s what let us get such a quick jump on the Reddit migration–he’d already done the hard work of getting a working product off the ground, and gave us a foundation to build on.

        Keep in mind also that the GitHub contributions only track code that’s been merged. We have a lot of great stuff in-flight or sitting in PRs right now.

        In short: we aren’t worried.

      • BrooklynMan@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        as of the latest test build. this is in the 5 hours since you posted your comment. the project is in good hands, and we think you’ll enjoy the next TestFlight build!

  • zalack@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    As much as I think he could have handled the transition a little more gracefully, it’s good to see an open source maintainer recognizing when they are no longer making their life better by working on a project.

    So many open source devs burn themselves out by continuing to work on projects that no longer spark joy out of a sense of obligation.

    This also should be a reminder to the community NOT to harass devs if a project is making choices you don’t agree with. The reason most maintainers contribute to open source is the hope that people will like and use their software. Getting messages that indicate people don’t like their work and won’t use their software is the quickest way to kill someone’s enthusiasm for their little corner of FOSS.