• 6 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • I developed one of the top ten apps in the webOS App Store. I released it about 6 months before they shuttered Palm and started the transition of webOS in to a vague “embedded and mobile things” open source OS that eventually ended up on, primarily, LG televisions.

    It was my first big success as a computer science student. When I started working on my next big app idea it was about 80% complete when the new dropped that they were discontinuing all phones and tablets. Palm used to send me free phones and tablets too, and I spent a lot of time in the community forums, I had reviews on webOS Nation, and so on

    I maintain to this day that enyo is one of the greatest app development frameworks ever written and I wonder what the landscape of web development would look like today if they’d moved faster to liberate it from mobile devices. The webOS team were also earlier adopters of nodeJS for their native services. It felt like living in the future using them at a time when the iPhone 4 was barely out.

    If you can believe it, after that I moved over to Windows Phone, where history repeated without the afterlife. After that, I felt cursed but, honestly, I chose both platforms because the stores weren’t saturated with 100 versions of every app imaginable.

    They were great times. Five big mobile platforms, free devices, open APIs to work with - it really was a digital gold rush.

    I now have LG TVs in every room and it’s so strange to use webOS in it’s final(?) form. Wonderfully, there’s a homebrew community just as there was back in the day, albeit on a much smaller scale. I’ve even made a wrapper for some home assistant features.

    webOS is dead. Long live webOS




  • Absolutely, but these problems are common to all the instances. Maybe I interpreted it wrong, it sounded like they were directly engaging the bad actors over management of the platform, and doing that rather than just quietly banning them and moving on.

    And to be clear I’m all for open collaboration and taking feedback, but I’ve seen this occur for Lemmy apps where loud and overbearing voices try and dominate the conversation to the benefit of noone, until Devs either stop responding or shut things down.

    Regardless, it’s sad to lose an instance and I hope the admins find something rewarding to invest in without having to deal with the internet’s worst members.



  • there are also some who use the platform to attack others, stir up conflict, or actively try to undermine the project. Admins are volunteers who deal with the latter group on a constant basis, this takes a mental toll.

    While I respect their decision I feel like these people will just move on to other instances to do the same thing.

    I don’t know all the details but it smells a bit “tolerant of the intolerant” and that these people should have been shown the door before it got to the point of shutting down (other reasons aside - they’re all valid)