Engage with people that have earned it in your eyes, whether by contributing to your project via code, assets, bug triage, writing a good and effortful bug report, whatever. Just ignore what the larger internet has to say about you and your creations.
Most people want to be helpful to others. This works fine when it is with a limited no of in real life interactions with mostly reasonable people. It can get wrecked by one or two unreasonable people, but the more fundamental problem is that it does not scale well, and the internet takes it to a far greater scale.
It is one reason so many of us essentially work for free for FB and the like: we do things to help others (advice and information), and the side effect is creating content and data for FB.
I don't think it has anything to do with the internet (whose scale pose many problems but not this one): anyone that founded a product/start up can tell you that people will give you “advices” and “suggestions” all the time when you talk about your project, and “don't listen to random suggestions from people you've just met” is one of the first advice you're being given when you're talking to other founders.
It doesn't even need to scale above a handful of people to be a nuisance that harm your project if you listen to them.
* lack information
* have a conflicting vision
* are being dishonest
I'm not a founder but I imagine that being integral to your own vision is the way to go. Attempting to cater to the conflicting needs of a diverse set of users isn't feasible for a startup.
But anyway this isn't valid only for founders but also to life, friends and family.
https://serenityos.org/ apparently only makes source code available. There are no binary images of the OS to install
I think Andreas said this functions like a little test -- if you're not willing to build it from source, then you might not be a good contributor. Or you might not be seriously interested in the project's goals.
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Likewise, my shell project provides source tarballs only, right now - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/
It is packaged in a number of places, which I appreciate. That means some other people are willing to do some work.
And they provide good feedback.
I would like it to be more widely available, but yeah I definitely see that you need to "gate" peanut gallery feedback a bit, because it takes up a lot of time.
Of course, it's a tricky balance, because you also want feedback from casual users, to make the project better.
And yes they will go cry on reddit or HN or their own blogs and call you names. Ignore it. Be happy in the knowledge of the thousands or millions of people whose lives you have improved by your labor. Most of them wont bother to say thank you, but a few will, rememebr those. And be happy in the knowledge that the worlds is a better place because you exist in it, in however small a way.
The key is to realize that human psychology is by default not well equipped to deal with the internet. We tend to react much more strongly to criticism than praise. Recognize that in yourself, and gradually change it.
The distribution game is kind of stacked for the most likely to burn out to be the most likely to be important in the stack and in desperate need of help.
Especially considering the responsiveness here is responsiveness to the peanut gallery.
It would probably be good for the maintainers too. If being responsive is seen as a way to have a bigger impact, people might be inclined to become more responsive and burn out.
You're not wrong, and that's the first mistake: the individual running a FOSS project wants to see their project succeed and willingly bends over backwards to make it so.
The more you care about popularity, or even acceptance, the more vulnerable you are.
If you're working on open source as a hobby (as I do), you should make this very clear to your users. You work on stuff you want to, at the pace you find enjoying. You don't take contributions you think will be hard to maintain. You make it clear you don't owe anyone anything. You also accept that, often, the best answer to an issue/contribution/disagreement is a fork.
Don't reward incompetence with a response -- are they paying attention, have they done their homework? (paraphrasing Maria Popova)
> How do you stop people from being mad that you’re ignoring them? (IME these types of people are likely to take things personally and start harassing you or complaining loudly in other forums…)
You don't (and can't) stop people from being unreasonable, mad, angry, or upset. That is their own choice. What you describe is bullying, plain and simple. Being nice to them because they might escalate later is counter-productive to your own mental health and gives them agency over your own time and energy. With bullies, the only way to win is to not play the game.
Decline with some boilerplate language?
There's this weird trend that's been happening for some time now that tries to make non-fully-open groups look wrong, but honestly, has anything ever actually been done by such open groups? As far as I can tell, "closed community" is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for any kind of quality creative output (this includes individual projects as single-person closed group). Having a core of creators surrounded by distinct group of fans and secondary contributors is a natural organization that forms spontaneously.
I don't think insults are the solution, but giving a clear no, is a skill many people struggle with. And if some cannot cope with that, blocking individuals also works.
This both makes a bar that the bug creator has to pass, filtering some of the drive by time wasters, and gives a reward to the developers for fixing it.
I'm not saying the community shouldn't be there, it's just that the barrier to entry is so low, that people can "contribute" with very little effort, that's become a significant problem as Internet usage (and acceptance of shit-posting trolls as just being a cost of anything online), so the signal/noise ratio is awful and we end up in an easy slide to controversy and spite and the good actors wanting to walk away.
I think this is why I don't do social media any more. I think it's why I'm not on the mailing lists I once was, or have interest in discord or a great many open community sites. It's just exhausting. HN, slashdot and some group chats in Signal with people I have known for many years is the closest I get to anything like that any more.
I've thought about doing some blogging without comments and a means to contact me directly another way privately. I've thought about making contributions to other projects with my only conversations being about my own commits, but that doesn't work for leading my own projects if I want to be "nice".
I think leading a project for me might involve _not_ letting others contribute to my version without clearing some arbitrary bar. No mailing list, no discord, no developer community. That doesn't feel optimal on some metrics, but it might be optimal for the metrics I care about.
Guess what you’re doing here, buddy.
I don’t really know how I’d classify the differences specifically…
I mean sure, but how do you intend to stop people? You can't stop them from setting up a forum somewhere.
This is why github discussions is useful though. A feature request in a ticket is something that needs to be handled. A feature request in a discussion is just some users talking about stuff they think would be cool.
It is necessary to establish clear boundaries of what can and can't be provided by the maintainers. If not done at an earlier stage of the project, the support burden becomes too much to bear at which point the maintainer transfers ownership, and the project suffers from catastrophic consequences such as the xz backdoor we're talking about here, or other cases where the project mostly stalls and serves as an ego-boosting platform for the new maintainer, as was the case with PhantomJS[6] before it was shut down.
This can also happen in your life, where a "friend" sees that you possess a certain skill, and then gradually tries to push an inordinate amount of their personal work related to this field onto you.
Personally, I think it's best to use an approach with extremely clear communication as to what the maintainer can and cannot provide. This can be seen, for example, in yt-dlp[1], where the consumer is clearly informed upfront that not providing detailed information as requested will lead them to block said consumer; or sqlite where their position regarding contributed patches[2] and support[3] is similarly made clear.
Having a shouty BDFL like Torvalds can also help improve code quality[4] and questionable contributions[5], though it is better that the shouty BDFL makes statements that are professional and do not show as much aggression; so for example, "Mauro, shut the fuck up"[7] would become "Mauro, your response is completely unbecoming for a Linux kernel maintainer, and is not in line with the promise of not breaking userspace."
[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/new?assignees=&label...
[2] https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html
[3] https://www.sqlite.org/support.html
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/29/linux_6_8_rc2/
[5] https://cse.umn.edu/cs/linux-incident
This is just PC corporate speak. Linus is an actual human being who says what he really means.
There is also no telling if the person is interacting in good faith and just doesn't know, in which case the aggression is a bit rude.
You can tell people to fuck off without saying that explicitly, and it also allows you to save face in case the situation isn't what you expected it to be.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...
I’m not much of a gamer at all. But the once in a blue moon where I dip my toes in, it’s not that long before I’m met with a forum post or reddit comment making some technical assertion that sounds incredibly presumptuous if not downright incredibly unlikely.
They haven't poked around with RenderDoc, they don't have the debug symbols to profile the CPU code, they have zero idea what kind of work the software needs to do, they simply know the lazy devs have failed to "optimize" their game.
So if your project's audience is gamers, of course it's going to attract more people which also means lower quality community almost automatically.
As for reddit and forum posts? The people willing to make an account to just to complain online are the most motivated of the negative people.
I believe this masochistic behaviour stems from a combination of both general optimism and dedication to a particular cause. The more that developers are passionate about what they are doing, the more they are willing to engage with the peanut gallery.
The author there does the absolute minimum of interaction.
Issues not following exactly the template or lack a repro gets closed immediately without any comment, actual bugs also see very limited comment or openness to discussion.
It felt a bit weird at first, but I do get the author and the library is succesful, maybe exactly because of this approach.
It made me reconsider some of the effort I spend in my open source projects with useless issues / comments.
I'm not saying everyone need to be Linus Torvalds circa 2012, but I do think more people need to be a bit less precious and sensitive, especially when receiving direct communication about their abilities.
You don't need ego-boosting yes men, you just need to work with more experienced folks, and that's okay. But the problem is that there is an army of people online who will take offense to that, and I don't know what the solution is. Best of luck.
WHO FUCKING GRANDSTANDS ENDLESSLY ABOUT CYBERTHREATS AND THE NEED FOR BETTER SECURITY?
WHO FUCKING SITS ON BILLIONS IF NOT TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN FUNDING?
That would be the FUCKING GOVERNMENTS OF THE FIRST WORLD. Whose modern economies increasingly rest on open source to a degree they possibly don't understand.
Yes I understand part of this comes from funding from another part of these governments. Oh well, cat and mouse. Once we wrung our hands over these governments having power over these. Well, these days we are facing far more totalitarian state threats and totalitarian wannabes in the private sector.
Government save me, as the less totalitarian option!
Linux and BSD the operating systems should UNQUESTIONABLY be funded to the degree of multiple billions per year by, I'll just put it, "NATO". Here's the true value of open source in this model: it is the perfect public record, unlike untold other aspects of government output.
You must produce public vetted code in Linux/BSD.
This person should not have been "a person". This should have been 5 people, funded likely at least 10-50k/year for their roles.
The described "hit" by the intel services of course is frighteningly easy. But what is most horrid is that this poor person is being subject to very common abuse that comes from non-state-actor manipulation. The article says it:
"this is where our software comes from" -- this poor dude that is trying to help and being abused by state actors on one hand, and ridden thanklessly and for no monetary or fame benefit by massively deep pocketed corporations, governments, and billionaires.
For all of Linus's famous swearing abilities, he hasn't used it to address this publicly. He should be dressing down all corporations and governments at this point that need Linux. There isn't a "going back" from Linux at this point to some closed source option.
Linus and Linux have massive sway here. They could threaten to stop work on the kernels.
I guess fundamentally, this makes me angry because this is basically bullying the nerd in high school to get his homework/answers. The nerds need to realize their power here.
Other vulnerabilities snuck through the commit chain? I get that, usual spy stuff. They actually kind of messed up here. Usually it is within the "cordiality" of things, just quietly ride the overworked unpaid nerd to benefit. Here they inadvertently exposed the real truth of everything: the hidden contempt we treat these people with as a society.
Needless to say, I did not assist him in any way and closed the issue as wontfix.
I've also had people demand that I expand the narrow scope of my project to cover a whole class of devices with completely different APIs, instead of the sole focus on the series from the same manufacturer of devices I own and use. Closed as wontfix as well with a clear statement that I will not be expanding the scope, but am more than happy to link to their project covering it.
But we all should realize that any interaction also comes with a cost. If you report a problem and don't manage to describe it well it doesn't help the maintainers one tiny bit, in fact it might just create work and a bad feeling.
So my approach is to "just" write stellar bug reports including ways of bisecting where the problem might come from.
By whom? You don't have to accept such expecteations - plenty of projects that just throw code over the wall and do fine.
For context, I've really only worked on "fun" side projects, namely emulators and game remakes, where I've explicitly avoided any mention of donations or similar. Both as it's intended to be a distraction from my job, not become part of it. And generally avoid as many issues as possible around said money distribution within the project, and possible copyright problems that such things often skirt.
And those sort of projects tend to be extremely limited in progress not by total interest, but skilled interest with the ability to contribute. I wish as many as 1% of the regular discussion participants in the community could contribute to that level.
There's a natural belief that unless someone is egregiously out of line, all discussion around a project from users is allowed, even encouraged.
But many people just can't seem to help themselves making "suggestions" (or, another reading, "demands"), and that can have a significant impact on motivation of volunteers. I believe the vast majority are from based in good intentions, wanting a "better" result, but arguably are mostly self-defeating in that I find the discussion around much of these things to be draining and demotivating. I want to have "fun" coding game remakes, not defusing drama in discord threads.
But it's expected to have a "community" for all such projects, and not exclude non-direct contributors. Even writing it down here I'm worried I sound like I'm trying to curate a closed community of ego-boosting yes men.
But I sometimes wonder if allowing this sort of open community is better in the long run.