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ThinkBeat

I dont often say this on the internet but WFT?

I am autistic. I love coding.

A single person can create wonderful software that is a gift to everyone as open source.

I hate trying to be an extrovert and engage with a lot of people. I hate twitter and discord

Does that mean that I and people like me cannot do open source in 2021?

Most of these seem like detriments more than anything.

* Engagement on Twitter * Official Discord chat room * Public roadmap * Predictable release cycles * Welcoming community involvement in shaping new features and tackling technical debt * Cultivating working relationships with wider ecosystems (in this case Ruby, Jamstack, etc.)

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The very next sentence in the article:

> Lack of any one of these points isn’t the end of the world, but at the present moment, Jekyll lacks ALL of them. That’s a real problem.

Nobody cares if there's no Discord if you're releasing and responsive to Github issues / roadmap questions.

The list with Discord is an example of what "open source in 2021" as opposed to being responsive to github. So yes, some care.

Just don't do any of that stuff if you don't want to. If you're writing software because it's useful to yourself and others and making it open to others to use you do not owe them a place to chat, engagement, a roadmap, a release cycle (or any given release).

You can weigh whether you want to do those things

Those things are often set up when people want to run software projects with certain goals and if those goals are not yours then that is fine, just know that there is a tradeoff.

One nice example is litestream[0]. It's open source, not open contribution -- similarly you can have open source without built in community/discord/project-management/etc.

[0]: https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream#open-source-not-op...

> Just don't do any of that stuff if you don't want to.

That's a privilege not everyone can afford. I cannot do real-time communication, So I cannot tolerate discord but GitHub issues are fine but I guess the parent is not fine with that too and that's alright but the answer is 'yes' open-source projects are subject to digital social conformity like so many things.

'like so many things': Just like how a Twitter account with at least 5 digit follower count has become a mandatory for a solopreneur's SaaS product to survive especially more so if the said solopreneur doesn't have other prior networks.

I think you might have misread my comment? I'm saying DO NOT do those things (discord or GH issues, etc)

> 'yes' open-source projects are subject to digital social conformity like so many things.

I whole-heartedly disagree. Maybe what's missing from the internet these days is the backbone to be clear about your own boundaries, but you absolutely do not owe anyone (who is not paying you) support or a place to file issues against your codebase that they don't also maintain.

You are not required to conform to anything you see on the internet (thankfully). This has more to do with your own motivations and goals. If you're making a F/OSS codebase to further your own ambition, then do whatever you think makes sense to get there and good luck.

If I stumble across some brilliant F/OSS work done by someone else for completely free and then released to me for completely free, I have already gained. They owe me nothing past that, and they never owed me anything to begin with.

> 'like so many things': Just like how a Twitter account with at least 5 digit follower count has become a mandatory for a solopreneur's SaaS product to survive especially more so if the said solopreneur doesn't have other prior networks.

Life for entrepreneurs is difficult and risk-laden, and that's why a lot of people don't become entrepreneurs. That fact does not mean the rest of the F/OSS world has to live like solopreneurs.

If you are making a product then it's your perogative to do what makes you successful (if that currently means trying build a "community" then so be it) -- that's your problem. If some person wants to just write software and make it open source so others can see it but doesn't want to maintain a community then that's their own perogative.

> Just like how a Twitter account with at least 5 digit follower count has become a mandatory for a solopreneur's SaaS product to survive especially more so if the said solopreneur doesn't have other prior networks.

Every solo entrepreneur has to be their own marketing department. In the 2020s, marketing has to include social media.

The #1 job of an entrepreneur is not "build project", it is "persuade people with money to give you money". Forget that and you'll definitely fail.

Twitter may or may not be the right place for that (personally I think not, but it works for some people).

> Does that mean that I and people like me cannot do open source in 2021?

Absolutely not, but it does mean that you are likely to have difficulty if your aim is to build and support a project that is used by many, or otherwise be widely recognised.

If your goal is to play with cool stuff, put the results out there so others might see it and maybe use it or further build upon it, and won't be bothered if people don't, then you can definitely do that successfully without any of the community building & engagement noise listed.[‡]

If your goal is to contribute fixes and other help to other projects, then that too can be done without any of that noise. Unless one of those noisy channels is the only way to effectively communicate with the project you are contributing to, at that point some compromise may be needed on your part unless you prefer to move on and do something else instead. Moving on and doing something else instead, or branching and doing your own thing that way as long as you are OK with any licensing implications, is always an option.

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[‡] I'm not autistic, nor as completely introverted as I used to be, but my thoughts on this feel like they stem from a similar place to yours and this is how I will manage that if I ever get around to releasing some of the stuff I have bubbling under: I'll put it out there, if people want to use it then great, if they don't then fine too, if they want to mail me fine (I might even respond!), but I won't be putting it out there to build community or to serve one. It'll be my playground, and while I'd be happy for others to find it useful if I move on and stop maintaining it or don't have time to respond to correspondence I will feel no guilt. If people expect more of me than I am comfortable providing, then they can just go on expecting!

> it does mean that you are likely to have difficulty if your aim is to build and support a project that is used by many, or otherwise be widely recognised.

Didn’t jekyll prove the opposite?

> Didn’t jekyll prove the opposite?

It doesn't seem to right now, apparently.

It may have done previously but either that didn't last long-term or, more likely I suspect but haven't checked, things were different and there was much more community interaction until the current quiet period.

Good technology alone isn't enough to lead to adoption. Tiddlywiki, imo, is the best personal blogging tools. It is a static site, it got an embedded editor, it got cool concepts realised like transclusion, among many others. Go ask around, I bet hardly anyone talks about it. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

https://tiddlywiki.com/

Having looked quite a bit for personal docs stores: tiddlywiki is definitely very interesting and fits its niche pretty well, and I too will highly recommend people take a look at it, but it's just not viable in many cases.

E.g. mobile requires a browser plugin (... which is a broken link, and there seem to be both few alternatives and they have reviews that imply there may be problems) or separate app to allow saving[1]. iOS requires a separate app[2]. Sync occurs in one giant html file, so if you edit one word, the whole thing has to be re-synced (so using it for any moderate amount of media is a no-go) (this is both a great feature for hosting-free purposes, and a great curse). Much of this has been due to browsers clamping down on permissions.

To work around those, your main option is to... use a web server to host it. If you do that, then tiddlywiki is basically just another self-hostable web server with an interesting UI - there are quite a few also-good competitors in that space.

[1]: https://tiddlywiki.com/static/GettingStarted%2520-%2520Andro... [2]: https://tiddlywiki.com/static/GettingStarted%2520-%2520iOS.h...

I agree. There is a lot of great software out there that never really tried to update themselves to the mobile world, and thus fell behind. Tiddly being made in 2004 is a great example of that.

Tiddlywiki got particularly heavily smacked down by browser and mobile-OS changes/decisions, to be fair. For a fair amount of time, you could open a static file on your disk and it'd have access to any other file on disk, and eventually could even write back to disk... then that was locked down because it became a security issue (which really isn't surprising, but it is unfortunate for legitimate uses). For a couple (few?) years, extensions could easily work around this... now it's a huge hassle. And through it all, mobile has either not had sufficient features for that at all, or has had much stricter permissions that effectively mean no disk access at all.

The whole concept of tiddlywiki (as a single mutable html file) has become extremely difficult to maintain, where it used to be extremely simple.

The rest of the stuff tiddlywiki does is still great - transclusion is a great idea, and it works well. Server hosting is extremely cheap and simple. The UI has some very one-or-few-users-friendly patterns, and it really does do non-linear quite well. There's a lot to like about it. But once you go to web hosting, you're competing with every other website - the ecosystem is quite literally like a million times larger than cross-OS-and-serverless, it's not surprising that it's not all that well known.

>Go ask around, I bet hardly anyone talks about it

Well, I, for one, have built this ADHD resource with it: https://romankogan.net/adhd

Depends on where you ask around, I guess =]

Like a business, the success of open source is generally not solely dependent on the quality of the engineering alone. That is, where success is defined by popularity, # of public contributors/users, etc.

Also like a business, you don’t try to do everything — you delegate against your weaknesses. You just need to convince one social person to contribute, and cover whatever social media nonsense is required.

Note that any project that scales in count eventually becomes primarily a human management and communication problem, irrespective of what’s being produced, or how. Either drop the goal of scaling up, or set your expectations accordingly (and delegate as needed).

Of course, sometimes doing nothing at all is all you need (a few users uses it successfully, and it spreads by word of mouth), but really this is just delegation by accident. Your users are taking the responsibility of communication onto themselves (and it will eventually fragment as different gossip ping groups get split-brained), and the project will eventually centralize communication or die under its own weight.

I think there’s a terminology gap that the article doesn’t do a great job with. Open source in 2021 does not require anything on the list. But to be a widely deployed open source project does generally require those kinds of things. As the parallel commenter noted, it doesn’t need to specifically be Discord or GitHub or Twitter or whatever, but to have mass adoption, the project needs to have directionality and momentum. Even if that’s “we feel we’re feature complete, if you find bugs, report them here”.

Without that, plenty of things are still “open source”, but users can’t really pick them up for their projects because they can’t rely on them. That’s fine: there’s plenty of really fascinating and meaningful projects out there that can’t be relied on for the long term. But for something like Jekyll, if I’m looking for a platform for my blog, I’d be remiss to pick something that’s stuck in the state it’s in.

That’s the issue that the author seems to be pushing at: he forked Jekyll because Jekyll is a widely adopted codebase that’s no longer able to support its niche, and he’s hoping that Bridgetown can fill that niche for users.

Thanks for explaining that better than I could apparently. Yes, obviously any software with a F/L/OSS license is "open source" but to build and sustain a community around a project of significance in 2021, there are some additional measures required.

Directionality and momentum? How about out-of-the-box functionality? What is the fascination with releasing unfinished products these days?

Does that mean that I and people like me cannot do open source in 2021?

It means few people will hear about or discuss your projects, and that means you won't get the critical mass of people necessary for your project to become popular. If you also conflate popularity with usefulness or importance then that's a problem.

Pretty much all big open source projects have benefited from "marketing" of some sort or another. If you're unwilling to do that then you're limiting the scope and size of what you can accomplish to what you can do on your own.

However, devs who are happy to contribute to an existing project where others do the social stuff are always welcome on pretty much every open source effort. So of course you can do it.

Fabrice Bellard doesn’t have Twitter. For all I know he might have never logged in to a Discord chat. He has still managed to create incredibly useful software (both open source and proprietary). Just sayin’.

Nothing is a rule here, it's more a reflection on some of the common traits of open source projects. I'm sure we all use open source software where we have zero engagement with its community in any way and we are super appreciative of the tool or library that is provided ( or often with libraries, we don't even know what we have buried in our stacks). You do you. If you have the problem of needing greater engagement for your projects, then look around at other projects and find something you are comfortable with, or invent your own way of engaging.

Don't think Jekyll is in the state it is in today due to lack of engagement, though it may not check all the boxes - no i think better alternatives propped up and jekyll failed at keeping up with the joneses. Still use it on my personal site without any major hitches though.

Open Source is Not About you - https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

It's not clear from the comment whether you're rebutting the gp or supporting them: when I first read it I assumed you were disagreeing/criticising @ThinkBeat, so just to expand a little on my own interpretation from the article:

- the linked articles is about open source maintainers defining the relevancy and scope of their own projects, and telling critics / commentators (like Jared White in the OP) that their expectations of project maintainers (like Jekyll's) don't apply.

So I think that @gregors here is supporting @ThingBeat by basically saying "Open Source is Not About [Jared]" (i.e. that @ThinkBeat has the freedom to define the scope of their own open source work).

Correct?

Correct. People might have the expectations of successful open source projects requiring marketing and community outreach pushes. Maybe those things aren't remotely interesting to the author?

Maintaining a public road map for example, that seems like boring busy work to me. If a project is truly dead anyone is free to fork or create a new project and spend their free time putting in the never-ending work.

"If you have expectations (of others) that aren't being met, those expectations are your own responsibility. You are responsible for your own needs. If you want things, make them."

You definitely have a place in open source. Good teams have a variety of skills so if public-facing communication isn’t your thing, partner with at least one person that likes doing that.

Absolutely not. You can do whatever you like. Do not let the noise scare you. Most of these things (twitter, discord) are just noise.

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