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this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Because most of us want projects with users, and there's a lot more users on GitHub and Discord than Gitea and Matrix
@OsrsNeedsF2P But that's the problem we need to fix, not the reason to give up. There will be more people on Gitea and Matrix if you try. There is also more people on Reddit and Twitter, yet here we are.
If you try. Have you ever maintained any sort of large FOSS project? Have you ever run infra for FOSS? Even if you control your own DNS, you somehow became your own Domain Name Registrar, you bought the fiber all the way to your internet backbone provider, you are still compromising somewhere. For those of us that actually maintain and run foss projects it’s a massive pain in the ass. There’s nothing to “give up”. It’s all about using your personal resources wisely. I can’t spend time trying to get gitea up and running when I can quite easily use GitHub and lose absolutely zero functionality. And it’s not like any project I put on GitHub is somehow worse off than on gitea, they’ll function exactly the same since I only use MIT licensing.
I wish I could upvote you more than once.
It all really comes down to making choices that make the most use of the extremely limited resources (time, money, spoons) you have as a maintainer.
@foosel If that is the case, then how did the choice of using an open-source license even get through? It sounds like you are confusing commercial thinking (we have to get more users, we have to be where the users are, we have to support them, we have to meet the KPIs...) with the open-source. You don't have to do any of those.
You misunderstood me. My reason isn't "get more users". My reason is "my day only has 24h and maintenance itself is a full time job, without adding on hosting, administration, etc for code repository or communication infrastructure".
I have to choose my fights if I don't want to burn out. I've been a full time maintainer for 10 years now, 8 of those self employed.
That being said, I do in fact self host a web forum for my project (which I can only do because I have a volunteer admin taking care of the day to day and a whole ton of mods helping with moderation), and I do have a nightly mirror of everything on the project's GitHub org to my private NAS just in case.
@foosel But why do you feel like you "have to" do those things? Are you paid for it? Are you trying to sell the project? Are you looking for VC funding? Is someone threatening you if you stop fighting those fights? Those are all things from the commercial mindset, or things exploited by Jia Tan. Of course everybody likes when a project is maintained, good quality, free, but that should come from the cooperation and from the freedoms in the license and platform, not from your personal sacrifice
Welcome to the real world, where open source maintenance should be a lot of things but instead boils down to a whole lot of personal sacrifices by maintainers. I don't like this either, and do what I can to improve it, but that's a slow process. Idealism is nice, but it doesn't help here.
And why do I do this to myself? Because I believe in open source and because I want people to have free access to good tooling. Currently I can afford to do this thanks to crowd funding of my work. I would never accept VC funding.
Kindly stop insinuating that I'm a turbo capitalist corporate drone, it's insulting and absolutely ridiculous.
@foosel So you want to continue sacrificing yourself? Your choice 🤷♂️
Now you are back to believing in open-source, so let's stop sending users to walled gardens, shall we?
Yeah, I don't see this discussion going anywhere given that you are doing your best to misunderstand me, turn my words around on me and just can't move even one step away from your idealism and instead demand that maintainers cater to that as well on top of everything else.
Have a nice day, I'm out, I have a project to maintain and a community to manage.
I think he's coming from here:
As an developer you create a solution to a problem from yours. You release it under a FOSS license.
Your job is done - You shared your work. The community may find your project useful and builds upon it. Their interest is to get their changes upstream. You have no obligation to help with onboarding and implementing features for others.
So if they are requesting a merge you may reject it since it does not meet your standards. Maybe you have to make your stance clear and create a CONTRIBUTION alongside your code.
With this mindset you wouldn't hang out on a non-indexable platform.
Your project mostlikely is requesting explicit participation. Maybe this is the point in between you guys.
Now go on with the discussion :)
Finally a comment with some sense. 100% agree
@foosel Saying that I demand maintainers to cater to my requests can be easily disproven by just looking at my words above where I say the exact opposite. Then who is doing their best to misunderstand and turn words around?