Many people have wondered what happened during August 2024 to the Raccoon for Lemmy app. The original repository was completely shut down overnight, and development continued in what was then the main fork — fortunately updated to the latest commit before the shutdown.

The fork was initially owned by a contributor called N7-X (who had already submitted multiple PRs upstream during the previous months), then transferred to new ownership and hosted within an organization, with N7-X and Akesi Seli as main contributors.

What happened, and more importantly, why? This article recaps the situation before and after the change to clarify things for the community.

Just a side project…

The app was initially hosted here (latest available snapshot from the Internet Archive) and had been primarily developed since mid-2023 by a developer from Italy as a side project to experiment with Kotlin Multiplatform technology.

External contributions were always welcome. During spring 2024, N7-X began contributing, starting with smaller tasks and gradually taking on more significant features — including Markdown support — eventually becoming a de facto co-maintainer.

The Markdown benchmark incident

On August 1st, 2024, this post was created in the Lemmy Apps community on lemmy.world. The moderator conducted a benchmark evaluating Markdown rendering across different Lemmy clients, scoring each app based on predefined test cases.

The benchmark’s goal was constructive: raise awareness about Markdown rendering issues so the community could work together to improve the Lemmy ecosystem during a critical period when the user base was fragmented across various competing platforms.

However, Raccoon had issues rendering tables correctly, and some format checks incorrectly evaluated text within poorly-rendered tables. This caused the app to be «marked down twice when it shouldn’t have» (see here), resulting in an initially very low score (not even 5 out of 10), before the post was updated.

The unintended consequences

What followed was unexpected and unfortunate. People began complaining about Raccoon’s poor performance, others suggested migrating away from the app, and the main developer started receiving notifications and negative reviews (during his summer vacation).

He suddenly realized his real identity was publicly visible and that the negative feedback could damage his professional reputation. Concerned about potential impact on his current job and future career prospects, he made the difficult decision to shut down the original repository.

A community-driven revival

The original developer was planning to create a new anonymous account and republish the app with a different package name, but before he could do so, the community had already adopted N7-X’s fork as the new “official” version of Raccoon.

Recognizing the community’s decision, the original developer worked with the co-maintainer to perform a comprehensive migration: changing the package name, updating URLs for remote assets, and moving the project to a neutral organization account.

Better than before

The transition proved beneficial for the project. The new team gradually restored and improved all aspects of the app, including:

  • enhanced Continuous Integration workflows;
  • improved test coverage calculation;
  • shared build logic among modules with Gradle convention plugins;
  • better quality assurance with static analysis tools.

Today, Raccoon for Lemmy is in better condition than ever, with active community support and ongoing development. While the circumstances that led to the transition were unfortunate, they ultimately resulted in a stronger, more sustainable project structure.

The incident serves as a reminder of both the challenges facing open source maintainers and the resilience of community-driven development when people come together to support valuable projects.

#lemmy, #community