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PSA syncthing-fork has changed owners (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Overview here

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/does-anyone-know-why-syncthing-fork-is-no-longer-available-on-github/25661/39

The new owner of the repo has a fresh github account and apparently has the signing keys from Catfriend1 too.

Time will tell if they are trustworthy, but for the extra paranoid it might make sense to pause updates for a while.

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[–] 59 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Not sure if I qualify as extra paranoid but this whole situation feels very sketchy and has me reconsidering my use of syncthing. Making significant changes like this without any explanation is extremely bad practice.

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  • [–] 74 points 9 months ago* (2 children)

    has me reconsidering my use of syncthing

    This is about a third party piece of software that isnt directly related to syncthing. The devs of syncthing have however been recommending syncthing-fork as their choice for android, so it definitely needs clearing up.

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  • [–] 42 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    We're sort of in this situation because the official project decided not to continue providing an official Android app, yet people want to use it on Android forcing unofficial versions to be created and maintained.

    I get that they don't want to deal with Google Play anymore, but somebody has to deal with it and them not owning the app is putting users at risk.

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  • [–] 23 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I get that they don’t want to deal with Google Play

    Was that the reason? Shame they didn't just leave it on F-Droid and GitHub then. Nobody needs to use Google Play (at least not yet...)

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  • [–] 26 points 9 months ago

    https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-android/23002

    According to this post, it was partly that and lack of maintainers. Given there's maintainers for a fork, I'm curious why they didn't bring them into the main project.

    Reason is a combination of Google making Play publishing something between hard and impossible and no active maintenance. The app saw no significant development for a long time and without Play releases I do no longer see enough benefit and/or have enough motivation to keep up the ongoing maintenance an app requires even without doing much, if any, changes.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Same here. It was already a little bit concerning that I was relying on a smaller fork to get syncthing on Android. It was on my to do list to figure out options. Now it's at the top of the list, and I'm not doing updates for the time being on Android. That's almost the entirety of my reliance on syncthing - phone to PC sync. I don't really need it that much for sync between PCs.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    I said this in another thread, but apparently it's not widely known: syncthing works fine on termux, there is no need to install any third party code. You do need to run termux-setup-storage to get access to the shared storage that other apps can access, and I found it worth it to set up the termux:boot app to run syncthing on phone boot. This way only uses the official syncthing repo.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I have heard that. Can it be given run conditions, like only on wifi, and respecting the Android battery saving setting?

    My phone has an always on split tunnel VPN to home, so the other sync devices are always accessible. Without the Syncthing-Fork run conditions it chews through mobile data and battery.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    You'll have to brew your own run conditions I think. For me, it's not a big deal, just a bunch of documents and pictures and not much gets added every day. But termux does have access to network state, and I'm pretty sure syncthing accepts stop and continue execution signals, so a shell script shouldn't be too difficult. Another possible option is to use termux:tasker.

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