Hello Mlem Community!

Yesterday’s news came as a surprise to you, the Mlem Community, but to nobody more than us, the Mlem Team who has worked diligently and passionately for weeks to help make the Mlem app everything it was envisioned to be. But, through perseverance and hard work, we all pulled together and spent 18 hours straight working very hard to migrate the repo, create a new App Store Connect account, merge over 40 PRs that were waiting approval in GitHub, and started a cycle of internal test builds. After rigorous testing, we have released a new beta with a ton of new features.

We’re well on our way to 1.0.

Obviously, we’re going to miss the July 1 deadline (but not by much) due to the setbacks of having our Lead dev and original app author absent for so long and then leave suddenly and without warning. As we said before, we support David’s decision to focus on his personal needs, his health, and to pursue his interests while wishing him the best. We will also honor his vision in making the best Lemmy app for iOS that we can, accessible for everyone. Beautiful, performant, accessible, and fun to use!

We realize that the Community is uneasy with the constant shifting of leadership in the Team, and we’ve fielded requests for clarification on our internal structure and, well, who we are. So, here’s a little about us:

We’re a small collective of developers and designers who are all volunteer contributors. David originally recruited me, BrooklynMan a UX Designer, Jo a developer, and, later, clay/s a graphic designer. I designed the prototype for the new interface you’re using today. clay/s designed the app icon (and the custom icons coming in future builds). Jo helped with initial development.

Later, when the workload and interest in the app skyrocketed, and a huge amount of pressure was on the 3 of us to put out a functional app extremely quickly, I was tasked with recruiting more people to help. I have recruited every other team member since. In the time since, David has pulled back from active development to take on the role of Project Manager, but eventually pulled back from that too as his health concerns demanded his absence from the project, assigning me to the role of Project Manager and Public Relations (Melm on Lemmy and Matrix), and I handed off primary UX design duties to others I had recruited.

Today, the leadership hierarchy is mostly flat since David left, and we make most decisions by consensus within the group. We’ve learned that, because of what happened, a division of labor and authority is the best way to move forward, and there are now several operational redundancies to ensure smooth, regular internal and external distribution so that updates will roll out more smoothly and regularly to the Community. We work very hard to bring the best Lemmy experience to you, and we don’t want that held up by any one, single person’s extended absence.

So, this is us:

The Mlem Team

  • CORE TEAM

    • BrooklynMan - Project Manager, Creative Team Lead, Community Relations
    • Eric - Developer Team Lead
    • mormaer - Senior Developer, Git Manager
    • Jo - Senior Developer
    • darknavi - Developera & UX Designer
    • Weston - Operations & Accessibility

  • CONTRIBUTORS

    • DEV TEAM
      • Surreal
      • noloman
      • tht7
      • q320
    • CREATIVE TEAM
      • clay/s
      • Guy Dudeman

As for our backgrounds, everyone on the Core Team is experienced with production-level development of iOS apps and most everyone has years of experience with Swift and SwiftUI. Those that don’t have years of experience with Swift/SwiftUI are getting help from those on the team who do and are learning a lot along the way! Our team is very friendly, with incredibly lively and active chat in several purpose-made Matrix rooms organized by team, and we work together across 9 time zones, from Seattle, WA to the Netherlands. It’s a pretty fun group to work with!

And, although we’re paused momentarily while we finish sorting everything out, next week we’ll be opening up recruitment again for those in the Community who wish to contribute!

We intend to go forward boldly and without reservation for what happened in the past to bring to you the best app we can make and in the vision we all shared with David: a beautiful, performant Lemmy iOS client made for everyone. We know you’ll love it!

– The Mlem Team