Oddbean

If you're a team developing full-time on a project, you should be releasing a stable increment every couple of weeks, at the latest. Gigantic merges are impossible for humans to review, and it means we have to beta test the entire thing, at once. The users just mass-downloaded this, even though it's been off in a dev branch for months and is a major release (even if it's missing some of the changes I expected, like improved login).

I mean, everyone just trusted them and downloaded this monster. The whole point of open-source is that you don't need trust because the development is conducted in a maximally-transparent manner, with frequent releases facing scrutiny by the end users.

No, it's not. That team has a big trust deficit, with those of us who have been here, for longer, as they keep doing weird stuff. Finding out that they ignored the issues and the PRs for the web-app, for 7 months, while fiddling around on a different branch, while everyone continued to fork from main, is like wut. Dev is 585 commits ahead. The last tag is from Aug 31, 2023. This is just weird behavior, for a Nostr project. They're publishing, technically, but doing it low-key and avoiding the social interaction that is typical of FOSS.

nah, there are different ways to approach foss and different sizes and scopes for project. Primal is evidently a more "company-driven" project, and its okay, it has his role in the space. In the end they implemented nips and tend to be compatible with protocol releasing source code for every binary they ship. Also the product is solid, more than most of the community-driven projects can be, due to more resources invested. I also prefer to use and contribute to more community driven projects, and I think that they tend to respect more users and become better with time, even if initially they tend to be more buggy and unpolished. But every software has his space, and primal team is definitively a good actor, delivering a fully foss client on multiple platform. And no seriuos dev has forked and worked on main branch without realizing that the company was working on other branches, it require just a minimun literacy and competence to figure out.

Okay, thanks for confirming that the Primal devs aren't interested in working with illiterate, incompetent, unserious people like me, so they're just off doing their own corporate thing. I think I've figured that out, now.

this is false, they are modern and auditable codebases, and the commits well organized and self-explicable. All is open, accessible and understandable for everyone. The point is that they follow a not so common dev practicing that could let new people on codebase a bit disoriented, but it doesnt impact the possibility of read the code and audit it by any means. Every codebase is different as it could fulfill different porpouses, so this drama is totally nonsense.

frankly dont know about backends codebases. Its super important to open source all and would be great to have responses about that. Still, backend involves trust in who runs it and offer the services, opening the source doesnt make much difference in reducing the trust that users need to put as theres no way to audit the computation happening in the backed.

opening the backend source, means we can keep primal honest by running our own.. if we cant, thats not very nostr like. if clients all use a primal cache cause its so cool and fast and has all these features, but its closed source, then we didnt accomplish the mission to decentralize. maybe the 3 months of no commits just means there arent any new commits because backend is the same as 1.0. i would highly doubt it. which is why i asked.