Technology

From: https://piefed.social/c/opensource/p/1473403/android-syncthing-repo-gone-and-developer-profile-gone-private

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social [S] 1 point 11 months ago

and @ezad@lemmy.world

~~https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/releases~~

[–] tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net 27 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

~~This ones a little old, but seems fine in Obtainium?~~

Right, as the next commentor says; it's deprecated, and won't get updates. Interesting that they basically are saying "move to a different service"?

This looks to be an active fork: https://github.com/RoootTheFox/syncmeow

🤷‍♂️

Update: The Syncthing-Fork source is still available here: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthingfork

[+] PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml 44 points 11 months ago (12 children)

[deleted]

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[–] rezad@lemmy.world [S] 35 points 11 months ago (9 children)

"2025-08-11"
that is from 3 months ago. I think that was another repo.

this repo I included had update until today.

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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 40 points 11 months ago (8 children)

yeah catfriend1 was technically in charge of syncthing-fork before the original syncthing stopped being developed. catfriend1 in other words essentially just continued development on their fork on their own, which kept syncthing alive.

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[–] paper_moon@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago* (6 children)

F-droid still has the most current builds available for the catfriend1 syncthing-fork.. But yeah, this isn't good. Damn. Was hoping if they needed to step back from maintaining a project like this, they'd at least have a call for a volunteer, or let the project languish until someone forked it again and took charge.. To shut it down completely, not great for anyone.

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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

Well, as OP mentioned, and others have speculated in the official syncthing forums, apparently catfriend1 did a repository reset where they wiped everything and started over something like three times last year. So that's still a possibility. I'm going to wait until more information comes out or until catfriend1 doesn't come back after a month or two before I start worrying about the future of the project. Worth finding anyone who had backed up the most recent version of the repository though, just in case.

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[–] paper_moon@lemmy.world 29 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

Thats.. An odd way to do software development. You can pretty much do whatever with git, its a very powerful tool. Shouldn't need to destroy and create repo's regularly..

Worth noting, if the repo never comes back, syncthing tray seems like they added android support per this message.

And it seems like you can install syncthing from termux and just use the webGUI, per that previously linked forum thread.

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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 11 months ago

I think that's generally agreed and no one seems entirely sure why catfriend1 chooses to do it this way.

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[–] vas@lemmy.ml 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

F-Droid has a copy of the source code I assume.

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[–] tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net 3 points 11 months ago

Yep, looks like it. We could continue this development elsewhere. https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthingfork/

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[–] KryptonNerd@slrpnk.net 2 points 11 months ago

I think helium314 keeps a fairly current version

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[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

They also maintained syncthing-lite and that's also gone. 😬

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[–] communism@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

That's about the upstream Syncthing Android app. This post is about a fork that was continued to be maintained after the "official" Android app stopped being developed.

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[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 1 point 11 months ago

That doesn't make sense. We don't use google play. We use fdroid.

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[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 11 months ago

Does F-Droid keep a backup of the apps' repo? Anyone has a backup of https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android ?

Maybe I should start having my own github mirror..

[–] midribbon_action@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 11 months ago (8 children)

The android development always just seemed... off, idk, I just got weird feelings about it and the fork. So I switched my family to use termux and termux:boot to run syncthing instead, it works fine.

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[–] AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Does running termux all of the time affect battery much?

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[–] midribbon_action@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Not as much as the syncthing apps.

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[–] Fmstrat@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

At that point why not use rsync?

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[–] midribbon_action@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

I have no idea what you mean. I just had to set this up once on my parents' phones and now it works all the time, even when they change networks, no port forwarding or any interaction required on their part. Rsync is a cli that requires an existing network connection between two devices, both online, and doesn't watch files or create a file version history. It is an entirely different tool.

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[–] Fmstrat@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Ahh, makes sense for your use case, then.

Rather than ST I used to use rsync+ssh, and just had a Docker SSH container running with users in the ENV.

I've switched to WG in all devices since then, though.

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[–] communism@lemmy.ml 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

The android development always just seemed… off, idk, I just got weird feelings about it and the fork.

Could you elaborate at all?

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[–] midribbon_action@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 11 months ago

Yeah, it's odd to me that the syncthing repo makes a point of not officially supporting android, and not making any promises about its continued maintenance. It's a large part of their user base, but it seems, for some reason, this developer that went dark never spent time to coordinate with or join the core team.

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[–] jjlinux@lemmy.zip 12 points 11 months ago

And I was wondering why I was getting an error 404 in Obtainium 😒

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

No one knows what the story is yet?

[–] sludgewife@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 11 months ago

it now redirects to a different github account, researchxxl. issues are turned off. old pull requests are there so it looks like the repo was transferred

[–] Mikelius@lemmy.ml 1 point 11 months ago

I have forks that are updated every night through a cron for these very reasons. But I didn't ever set it up for Android apps... Time to fork a whole lot more projects. sigh

[–] papertowels@mander.xyz -1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

~~To be clear, this was announced months ago. Many folks moved to syncthing-fork on android~~

EDIT: I was wrong! This is def syncthing fork.

[–] somewa@suppo.fi 22 points 11 months ago (10 children)

Any ideas why this happened?

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[–] iloveDigit@piefed.social 4 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Coding is "illegal" now, remember?

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[–] somewa@suppo.fi 20 points 11 months ago (8 children)

A lot of guesses point to a repository reset: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/does-anyone-know-why-syncthing-fork-is-no-longer-available-on-github/25661

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[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 7 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Looks like it's just random commenters taking random guesses because those have happened before.

What is a “repository reset”? One commenter writes:

There was a temporary similar “outage” back in July with rewritten history, apparently something inappropriate was recorded in the repo history they wanted cleaned out. The repo came back after that. I have no idea if this is the same thing, or if they just got tired of maintaining it.

Seems strange to me. You can prep locally and then force-push. I don't see why rewriting history would require taking the repository down.

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[–] somewa@suppo.fi 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

If he pushed something he shouldn't have online then taking it offline immediately makes a lot of sense.

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[–] orygin@piefed.social 6 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

It makes sense, but once it's pushed there is no way to know if it's been cloned or kept somewhere else. The only real mitigation is to rotate the keys or password that was leaked.
If it's something else you can't rotate, you're screwed.

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 5 points 11 months ago (1 child)

https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/anyone-can-access-deleted-and-private-repo-data-github

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[–] somewa@suppo.fi 2 points 11 months ago

The point wasn't that it's not accessible but limiting the damage while you still can.

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[–] orygin@piefed.social 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Plus won't the forks on GitHub keep the history before the "reset"?
Afaik, forks on GitHub are basically the same underlying repository, just a branch associated with another user. They won't be able to really purge anything from these other branches.
Plus anyone who has a local copy of the repo or an automatic mirror somewhere else, will have the changes available.

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[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 1 point 11 months ago

Yes, forks remain as they are. Yes, the fork network has a shared data repository on GitHub.

Consequently, rewritten history will break history compatibility, possibly requiring manual fixups on forks or work based on it.

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[–] iloveDigit@piefed.social 1 point 11 months ago

Oh.

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[–] Wistful@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 11 months ago

Oh shit. What do now.