Thank you for the measured take on this.

You are correct, I don't intend to pressure or cause harm! But I certainly see the results, and it is indeed pressure. As another commenter pointed out, there are many instance admins who work a bit closer to the team on the Matrix chatrooms and that's their preferred method of communication. Now that I know this, I'll let things cool down and join myself. I definitely intend to contribute where I can in the codebase, and I wouldn't dream of escalating to public pressure for smaller concerns.

However, I have a slight, and perhaps pedantic disagreement about making changes. In this case, the request was for not making a change. If it weren't for the fact that the feature was already ripped out it would be as simple as not removing it (or in this case re-working it a bit). I understand that it isn't the current reality, and that it required work to revert - and if not for a ton of spambots, I think It would've been easier to adapt.

Ultimately it will take time to discuss workarounds and help others implement them, and the deadline is ultimately the arrival of the version that drops the older captcha (or was, in this case - it's getting merged back in as we speak - might even be done now). With that reality, I had a sense that this could be an existential problem for the early Threadiverse.

I definitely didn't intend to suggest that the Devs were in any way at fault here. I read the github issues enough to come with the takeaway that a quick (relative to a new feature) reversion to the prior implementation. To me the feedback they were receiving seemed to be "Admins and devs alike are okay moving forward and opinions to the contrary are minimal, let's move forward". It was definitely intended to be a way to communicate using raw numbers (but not harassment). I'd like to think I'm fairly pragmatic in that if it IS working for folks, then that is a contrary opinion, and that it was missing.

Where I definitely failed was my overly emotional messaging. It's certainly not an excuse, but my recent autism diagnosis does at least help explain why I have an extremely strong sense of justice and can sometimes react in ways that are less than productive in some ways.

As for the licensing, I agree! I'm talking to some good friends of mine because I want to take my instance WAY further than most others - goal is a non-profit that answers to Tucsonans and residents of larger Pima county rather than someone not in the community. There's just a lot of features this concept would need that it might diverge so much from the Lemmy vision that it needs to be something new - and hopefully a template for hyper-local social networks that can take on Nextdoor.