Fediverse

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.

Regrettably, complaining tends to be a common pastime for many individuals. I acknowledge your frustrations with certain users who may appear entitled or unappreciative of the considerable effort you've dedicated to developing Lemmy. Shifting towards a mindset that perceives complaints as opportunities for enhancement can be transformative. Establishing a set of transparent rules or guidelines on how you prioritize issues and feature requests could help turn critiques into opportunities for improvement. This transparency can help manage expectations and foster a more collaborative relationship with the users in your community. While not all complaints may be actionable, actively listening to feedback and explaining your prioritization criteria could go a long way in building trust and goodwill. Open communication and a willingness to consider diverse perspectives can lead to a stronger, more user-centric product in the long run.

The philosophy of Complaint-Driven Development provides a simple, transparent way to prioritize issues based on user feedback:

1. Get the platform in front of as many users as possible.
2. Listen openly to all user complaints and feedback. Expect a lot of it.
3. Identify the top 3 most frequently reported issues/pain points.
4. Prioritize fixing those top 3 issues.
5. Repeat the process, continuously improving based on prominent user complaints.

Following these straightforward rules allows you to address the most pressing concerns voiced by your broad user community, rather than prioritizing the vocal demands of a few individuals. It keeps development efforts focused on solving real, widespread issues in a transparent, user-driven manner.

Here's a suggestion that could help you implement this approach: Consider periodically making a post like What are your complaints about Lemmy? Developers may want your feedback. This post encourages users to leave one top-level comment per complaint, allowing others to reply with ideas or existing GitHub issues that could address those complaints. This will help you identify common complaints and potential solutions from your community.

Once you have a collection of complaints and suggestions, review them carefully and choose the top 3 most frequently reported issues to focus on for the next development cycle. Clearly communicate to the community which issues you and the team will be prioritizing based on this user feedback, and explain why you've chosen those particular issues. This transparency will help users understand your thought process and feel heard.

As you work on addressing those prioritized issues, keep the community updated on your progress. When the issues are resolved, make a new release and announce it to the community, acknowledging their feedback that helped shape the improvements.

Then, repeat the process: Make a new post gathering complaints and suggestions, review them, prioritize the top 3 issues, communicate your priorities, work on addressing them, release the improvements, and start the cycle again.

By continuously involving the community in this feedback loop, you foster a sense of ownership and leverage the collective wisdom of your user base in a transparent, user-driven manner.

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.

I honestly haven't heard back much from mbin so I dunno

It’s normal that there will be forks and alternatives

This is not the sentiment you have previously expressed in direct response to these forks and alternatives. Thinking specifically about your activity in the sublinks announcement posts.

Honestly, I think the Beehaw admin might've simply nailed it when they talked about vision. There's nothing inherently wrong with not wanting to be the lead over a project having hundreds of thousands or millions of people involved. That's not inherently necessary to always grow.

I hate to bring political/economic ideology into this, but I'm reminded of Marxist philosophy. In that ideology, properly realized, there are no huge, massively-scaled organizations that lead top-down. Only smaller independent ones that work cooperatively, nothing much bigger than a city-state. The idea of endlessly-growing scale being beneficial is generally a capitalist value.

The ones making the mistake could be us, if we misunderstood the devs real wishes. We would just be projecting onto them, with our own ambitions and goals. That's not actually healthy.

I get it and i don't give a fuck about the features i know the image issue is hard to implement because of federation all i want from you is to not ask everyone to leave the moment a criticism comes to light then you will be the king of a ghost town.

I agree. A lot of the friction here is due to miscommunication. That said, if what I said kept being misunderstood, then I would make a priority to improve my communication style.

This shit is hard. If one has ASD like I do, it's even harder. Personally try to be very exact on what I say, even when speaking casually, and pepper smilies and caveats to try to ensure people don't take what I say the wrong way. And even then I've stepped in it a number of times.

My perspective is that lemmy found perhaps a very unexpected success, and caught the devs flatfooted and this is how the stress of that success is manifesting. In short, they walk the walk, but can't talk the talk.

There's a saying where I'm from, that the Queen doesn't just need to be pure, she needs to appear pure. And those two things are completely different skillsets.

I know i have been defending lemmy devs for a long time and i agree with all this the only gripe i have is nutomic seems to think he have hit it big and doesn't need to give a fuck about anything and seems to tell anyone with even the slightest criticism to stop using lemmy these past weeks and i can't simply act like that isn't wrong. I agree beehawe admins can fuck off and they are entitled assholes but this behavior is making me rethink my stand .