I can relate to a few things here (e.g. definitely share the lack of coordination), of course others very much not - it drives my curiosity through the roof: Any stories on what happens when you are with the FFL and have no coordination from start to end? I feel like there have to be some very good ones :)

There’s now a fully open source ios app in beta: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/beta-test-my-new-ios-app-for-syncthing/22457

If you like the LOTR movies, go watch this movie! I already had a big smile on my face the moment the New Line logo started appearing (not because of the logo :P ). I want sure if I’d like the anime style, but while I still prefer live action it was great, especially the beautiful backgrounds resp. landscapes. The story is quite straightforward and brings you a backstory to places or people featuring in lotr Rohan, but there’s no direct connection (which I think is good). I wouldn’t have considered it YA. Just less “visually violent” due to animation, but theme and story seem pretty much standard. I’d say the main target age is anyone that has already seen lotr :P

As the statement says I wont - it will be fully discontinued. This statement applies to the official app only. It doesn’t say anything about other apps or forks - any existing once can and hopefully will continue to exist. Also all the code is free.

I am not the creator, funnily that is/was one of the Lemmy creators: Nutomic :)
I am a syncthing co-maintainer that kept the android app on life support since a while.

It’s all in the open, you can go dig around for reasons. As usual there wasn’t a single simple one. Neither was it some kind of complete fallout, we e.g. collaborated on translations and I have been in contact around various things with the one that forked.

Oh don’t worry to much, mine too: If there wasn’t an alternative for syncthing on android, I might have kept it on lifesupport :)

The only one I know personally isn’t primarely a charity, but they did donate older equipment to a project I was involved in once: https://revamp-it Two charities/associations I found right now: https://wir-lernen-weiter.ch/laptop-spenden/ https://www.archezuerich.ch/brockenhaus/reparieren-statt-wegwerfen/secondhand-computer

Not Australian or American, but hey it’s the internet so why not voice second hand knowledge: I heard Aussies pride themselves on being (relatively) egaliatarian, despising individuals elevating themselves above others. Seems to me about as antithetical to US mentalitity as it goes :)

Yeah no exact opposite for me: Big server means lots of user data making abuse of it more appealing and impactful. While an admin of a small instance having some fun digging through user internals would really do no harm (I don’t believe that’s a particularly typical hobby of small instance admins though xD ).

I hope it costs those companies a ton of money to walk away from the auctioned contracts. Sounds like a typical problem of many public construction projects: They get evaluated on cost only, many companies (in bad faith or not) bid at too low prices and thus get the contract over other companies which might be much better set up to get the project to completion in time/in budget/on good standards. And as they are better set up, they likely have a better handle on real costs - as in actual subject experts evaluate costs, not just some sales/business people making optimistic estimates (“guesstimates”). And maybe even finance people thinking about stuff like possible higher inflation ahead of time and counting that in/hedging against that (not sure if hedging on inflation is a thing, but then again almost everything seems to be a thing in finance so I assume it is :P ).

It’s working for me now, so likely resolved in the meantime or a local issue.

This is an expected statistical artifact given the “last month” aggregation and a huge influx of new users of which many don’t stick around. I am saying they don’t stick around, because that’s generally just what happens with a lot of new users (e.g. they checked it out, decided it’s not for them) and also due to the federated nature they might have switched accounts and similar things. Then the bit about “last month” aggregation: Have a look at the “Active 6 months” graph - it’s still trending upwards. Those are likely a trailing average aggregations, so a maximum is reached when that 1-month-window starts (roughly) at the beginning of the huge user influx. For the 6-month window that hasn’t happened yet, so still going upwards. Assuming nothing changes (similar amount of new/leaving active users) the graphs gonna be interesting in the next few weeks: After the initial wave of influx the balance was most likely negative (more users from “the wave” dropping out again than added users afterwards), however I’d hope it’s gotten positive since then. If that’s the case the graph should start trending upwards 1 month after the balance became positive. It’s unclear when that was the case, but some towards end of July might be a reasonable guess? The same graph with a smaller window could shed some light on that (or just expose useless noise ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ).

Another sign I’d consider good: The active user ratio is trending upwards.

Disclaimer: I don’t know how the data is aggregated, nor how exactly “active” is defined - the gist of the above very likely applies though. I was too lazy to look it up in the code - if someone knew how these graphs are aggregated and were so kind to let me know, that’d be appreciated :)

Looks like the client isn’t, but they do offer a simple-way to self-host the backend (looks like it’s “just” a matrix server and a bunch of bridges) and then you can use any open-source matrix client to connect to that. Seems like a pretty good balance of a way to make money and the guts being open enough that one could move if the client/company goes side-ways, while contributing a lot to the open-source community.