BetterMeower

BetterMeower is a third-party Meower Client created by community members JoshAtticus, Mdwalters, Bloctans and catonmeower. It is a fork of Meower Svelte.

BetterMeower is currently released as BetterMeower Classic at https://classic.bettermeower.app.

Features

A word-to-word copy-paste of the features section in the readme:

• Better dark orange theme
• PWA Support
• More themes
• More profile pictures
• Better support for small phones
• Emoji Shortcodes

History

On the 22nd of September 2022, community member JoshAtticus was waiting for Meower Svelte 1.4.0. Instead of waiting, he instead decided to make a fork of Meower Svelte, which was originally going to be called Meower BetaNow, although community member Mdwalters said that it should be called BetterMeower.

BetterMeower initially had problems with npm and nodejs, although JoshAtticus eventually discovered that you need node.js 16 or higher to build a svelte web app.

BetterMeower was and still is to this day, hosted on Cloudflare Pages, a free service provided by Cloudflare to host web apps and static websites.

Copyright Issues

On the 29th of June 2023, MikeDEV, the CEO of Meower, announced some much needed clarifications regarding the Meower project. Here is the message in it's entirety.

Project statement

I don't think we ever had a very clear or set-in-stone project vision created for Meower. So, I would like to make it official. If someone asks you what the purpose of Meower is, this would be our projects vision statement:

The Meower project strives to create, develop, maintain, and promote a 100% libre social media platform, encourage a healthier and friendlier usage of social media, and uphold individual rights and privacy.

Code/assets usage & Intellectual property

Also, as a reminder/clarification, we are a open community of individuals, everything we create for Meower should be considered "for all of us". Please don't consider taking code from x and moving it to y and calling it "stealing". There is no such thing as "stealing" in this kind of project. Rather, the more engagement we have, the better.

Of course, I should also mention this: Since I own and run the Meower project, ultimately I am entitled to IP. However, in belief of libre software and an open community, anyone has permission to use Meower IP as long as it's used properly.

Anyone is free to use our assets (art, sounds, etc.) under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

You may view a summary here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

For source code, we primarily (and strongly recommend) use the MIT license.

Here is a summary: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/

For the Meower name/logomark, you must use it respecting CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Again, a summary for this license as follows: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

(However, we are aware that there are existing derivative projects that use the Meower name, and we do allow exceptions. Just contact a council member for help.)

Because of the new license that would be used for Meowy and the Meower wordmark, BetterMeower would have to rename, and BetterMeowy, the BetterMeower mascot, would have to be deleted.

That would be, if BetterMeower didn't get an exception from MikeDEV. MikeDEV gladly granted BetterMeower an exception to the license, as long as they used the responsibility properly.

Domains

BetterMeower was originally hosted at https://bettermeower.osmanic.co (along with the https://bettermeower.pages.dev site provided by Cloudflare Pages), however after the domain expired, JoshAtticus bought 2 new domains, https://osmanic.net to replace https://osmanic.co and https://bettermeower.app, which is the new home for BetterMeower.

All domains used by BetterMeower (except the pages.dev subdomain provided by Cloudflare Pages) were registered with VentraIP, an Australian wholesale domain registar.

Rewrites

1.4.0 Rewrite

After the BetterMeower Team had issues with upgrading BetterMeower to use Meower Svelte 1.4.0, JoshAtticus decided to perform a full rewrite of BetterMeower. BetterMeower 1.3.2 was moved to BetterMeower/Old-BetterMeower while BetterMeower/BetterMeower was replaced with the 1.4.0 rewrite.

1.5.0 Rewrite

Due to codebase issues, the BetterMeower team was going to rewrite BetterMeower to use the new Meower Svelte 1.5.0 codebase. This rewrite however was cancelled, as the CL4 Meower Svelte client would be coming out soon, and rewriting on top of that would be a better idea.

Although the rewrite was cancelled, BetterMeower remained inaccessible, as the Meower Svelte 1.4.2 based BetterMeower 1.5 was broken due to git merge conflicts.

CL4 Rewrite

The CL4 rewrite is a planned rewrite which is planned to commence around the end of January 2023. It will bring compatibility with the updated CL4 based Meower Server, and update the Meower Svelte codebase from 1.4.2 to the latest version.

BetterMeower Classic

BetterMeower Classic is an exact copy of BetterMeower 1.5.0, with new features and changes, such as a 4K home character limit and 2K group chat character limit, moderation panel, better profiles etc. It is accessible at https://classic.bettermeower.app.