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 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.
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.
I never understood the “when it’s ready” excuse. It’s only not ready when it contains stolen code, otherwise as unstable as the application may be, the code is ready for release.
Kbin didn’t haven’t an API so they were using screen scrapers. I assumed they were waiting for a proper API rollout. But who knows now.
Yeah, they apparently used scrapers for a while, but it’s obviously not a very performant way to do things. Artemis Camp was launched with an upstream branch that introduced API work, and the app was adjusted to use that as a playground.
Right? Like, my app is definitely not ready yet its source code is available for all to see. And since I’m currently inactive, you could even fork it and get a bigger following than me if you wanted to.
These people just think too highly of themselves.
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.
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.
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.
