1203
Open source devs: please, please add screenshots...
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
1203 points (97.8% liked)
Open Source
31358 readers
156 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
- !libre_culture@lemmy.ml
- !libre_software@lemmy.ml
- !libre_hardware@lemmy.ml
- !linux@lemmy.ml
- !technology@lemmy.ml
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Although I understand the OP's perspective open-source is a community effort and people should have a more proactive attitude and contribute when they feel things aren't okay. Most open-source developers aren't focused / don't have time for how things look (or at least not on the beginning). If you're a regular user and you can spend an hour taking a bunch of screenshots and improving a readme you'll be making more for the future the project that you might think.
When the last big Twitter migration to Mastodon occurred there were a lot new users complaining about things like documentation, bugs, etc. Old users and FLOSS supporters kept pushing the "its open source, write a doc or fill out a bug ticket" and evem included documentation on how to do those tasks.
Most people just continued to complain. /facepalm
We just don't live in a world where making the changes you want are encouraged. We have been thought to just accept whatever changes happen or at most file a suggestion that almost noone will listen to. Obviously open source is different but it's still such a tiny minority compared to how the rest of the world functions
The big difference here is there is already this "learning curve" about the whole fediverse that people were struggling with that many of us wrote blog posts and had toot chains we'd forward explaining how this universe works. Adding in links and screen shots and templates for how to submit a bug...
...I hate saying this but the vast majority of people are just lazy. It's not a culture issue or not something too difficult. People like to complain and not put in effort to things. People expect others to do things for them and don't get that free comes with a cost.
FOSS isn't really that small, it's just that most people don't do any type of investigation into what they use for technology. Much of what you use may have a for-profit company in front of it but huge parts of their products are open source andnyou can directly influence the products by actually engaging the projects themselves.
Yeah people are very much lazy and that's fine, you just have to work around that and well culture is one way of getting people to do what should be done.
As you say Foss does impact quite a lot of those company products however what is the important part of the casual user is what and how they interact directly with the products and well at no point are they expected to directly impact the project, it's just you use what you are given. That is why they have that people will do things for me mindset bc that is what happens with almost everything the use
I think this is interesting, certainly screenshots and giving an idea of how something works is important. It seems more important to many users rather than say developers. I guess developers have a different set of priorities, maybe it does make more sense for users to add screenshots or contribute as it is in their interest whereas maintaining and fixing critical bugs is more within the interest of the developer?
How would this even be communicated effectively to users? I find that most calls to support are vague and maybe if they were broken down by interest or skill set it would help people understand that they too could do something.
E.g. Having a headline that says contribute, and like a table with icons for different professions or areas people could contribute with different processes for each. I have friends who are good typesetters or editors, but they would not put in the effort to use github, they would prefer to use something closer to social media or word/docs at the most. It feels like github samples from only a subset of the population and is actively trying to ensure the comfort and curation of that community to the expense of others and collaborative work in general.