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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Not for folks who have been following the development. It’s one thing if it’s just a couple of devs working on the project and trying their best, it’s an entirely different thing when a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues. It's become a pattern and will almost certainly continue. At this point a significant number of users have been lost because the devs have been largely unable to capitalize on previous waves on growth due to slow development. Because of all this Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute. A fork would probably be a significant improvement as far as brand perception goes.
This is the first I've heard of "a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues" and "Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute".
Can you give a summary or examples? I'm not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don't follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn't aware of any of this.
I dont know much about the primary developers of Lemmy, but from what I can tell this is a part time labor of love project for them. Its unreasonable to ask people to push beyond their boundaries or capacity so that their pet project can become a 1:1 replacement for an incredibly mature platform like Reddit overnight
To the detriment of the community, the admins, and the concept of the fediverse overall.
Unfortunately opinions do not always match.
If a large group of people do not agree with the direction the Lemmy devs are making, why not get together and create a new site forked off Lemmy's source code?
It seems like the fediverse is a return to a more liquid internet, similar to the early internet of the 90s. A lack of existing large infrastructure here is actually advantageous for new sites to startup.
With respect, maybe you shouldn't be commenting on what's going on behind the scenes. They are good developers but they're not good leaders or shepherds of such a big project. They need to hand over stewardship to someone that can be trusted.
Sometimes things become bigger than just what they were before, take on a life of their own.
When it gets to a humanity community level need then maybe the devs should turn it over to others who can do that, or at least accept the help of others who have been trying to help them grow it more/better.
We have a responsibility to ourselves, but we also have a responsibility to each other.
Sounds like you should fork it.
I would love to contribute but I don't have the experience for a fork. This is kind of the essence of the whole problem though. Plenty of unutilized contributors who could be driving this project forward but are having a hard time getting involved.
This sort of thing happens in every opensource project; the maintainer(s) have a vision for the product and whatever amount of time they can use to review contributions and PRs. Some PRs are utter messes, some are good but complex, others are good but either are not going to be supportable with the current manpower or will be superceded by codebase changes in the future. And then these contributors get upset their PRs aren't being taken seriously. They as well are welcome to fork it and they could even use patches from the original branch as they develop their forks, and presumably implement them in production. But more often than not, they just move on because they don't have much invested.
It's every maintainers balance that has to be determined, and not everyone is going to be happy. They might want a slow development pace because fast paces require a lot of work to maintain. Simplistically saying "we need faster development to take advantage of surges in interest" is pointless if there's nobody that's willing to stand behind the extra QC and support those patches introduce. Drive-by patching is a huge issue because the contributors rarely stick around to fix bugs.