this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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It's obvious that people are indeed doing or thinking of doing just that. Don't get complacent just because things have not changed yet. There is a threshold to cross and once it crossed, things change very very fast. Currently there's no software out that is as mature as lemmy, but if the trust thermocline is breached, people will prefer to switch to something substandard than support a project they don't believe anymore.
Your biggest benefit as FOSS developers is your community goodwill. I can't stress enough how much you need to be careful on what you say and how you communicate to maintain it.
Look at it this way: I've spent almost every single working day for the past four years developing Lemmy. I implemented the entire federation logic and much more. Most days and nights I think about ways to improve Lemmy and it's not easy to shut off. Especially during the Reddit blackout it was extremely stressful as we were completely bombarded with requests, I didn't even have time to keep up with all the issues.
Yet last week some individuals came along who never made any contributions to Lemmy and never showed the slightest gratitude for my work. They essentially what I'm doing is wrong and that they should be in charge of decisionmaking for Lemmy. One Beehaw admin even said that all my work on Lemmy is meaningless.
I know you and many others have good intentions with your criticism. But after all the negativity of last week I simply don't have the mindset to accept any of it.
Mate trust me I understand all about Foss stress and burnout. I've been doing Foss for way longer than 4 years and the ai horde has been very demanding as well (and I also have a day job and small children) . But through all this, you have to learn to keep your cool. It's sometimes better to just come out and say "people, I'm close to burnout and I can't comment now" or "I am going to work on this as fast as I can but if someone can get to it first feel free" etc. It's way better to explain that you're overworked than to attack people. It's also OK to say nothing at all than to go on the offensive. People can understand the former but the latter will never work the way you expect.
I keep saying that this is a pure communication issue. I (and many others like sunaurus) can clearly see you're working hard and we understand how much there is to do, and this is why I'm dismayed when I see you escalate.
If you want we can get in a voice chat and I can share how I deal with these situations and what has worked for me. Just pm me. I really think this is made unnecessary harder than it needs to be.
Thank you for the offer but its not necessary. Ive also maintained open source projects long before Lemmy so Im familiar with the occasional entitled user on Github. In my experience its not a good idea to make any promises to these users because they will view their entitlement as justified, and make more demands.
However its a completely different quality when its not just Github comments, but multiple blog posts within a few days attacking Lemmy and me personally. Sure my responses were not ideal, but it was the best I was capable of at that time. If I had said nothing, people would assume that all the accusations are true and I have nothing to defend myself (like the claim that Im a "tankie" which has been going around on Mastodon for years).
In any case I think its better to say something and get my view out rather than being quiet. Sure there are miscommunications but those can be cleared up, and I can learn how to communicate better in the future. On the other hand if I said nothing, I may be left with the impression that my work sucks, and lose all motivation to keep working on Lemmy. Then I would be stuck doing nothing at all. Luckily that hasnt happened, Im still working on the project like before.
The only ones I want to chase away are those who somehow feel entitled to demand some specific work from me. But that is only a very small part of the userbase. I know Lemmy isn't perfect and I'm working every day to improve it. If anyone thinks that some area is not getting enough attention, they are welcome to make a pull request and I will happily review it to get the changes merged.
Thanks for the support, I appreciate it and definitely don't want people like you to go away. However there has been a lot of negativity during the last week, so automatically my attitude also got more negative in general.
Doesn't mbin have feature parity?
I honestly haven't heard back much from mbin so I dunno
I use it from time to time, it's quite decent. I prefer the Lemmy UI, so I use it more, but I really could use Mbin much more if it was the opposite