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Before you say anything, ask yourself
1) Does this need to be said?
2) Does this need to be said by me?
3) Does this need to be said by me, now?
Besides, begrudging people time spent on community sounds like something your last shitty manager would do. Can’t tell if GP is shitty manager material or has Stockholm Syndrome from them. Odds favor the latter.
i hope your friends and family truly appreciate the perfection of your worldview, and can move fully to your simple answers
What? Does software development just go away if you respect your users? Do people not want 3rd-party Mastodon or Matrix clients just because the orgs aren't running advertisements on their servers? Is the idea that I install Linux and everything just magically works because Linus isn't trying to sell me something?
Building services that respect users is still work. It's still a thing that people can help with and support, either directly or through 3rd-party tooling and extensions.
No, there isn't a reasonably sized market for many 3rd party Mastodon or Matrix clients.
Also, are you seriously going to argue this? Are you seriously going to double down on the idea that services that respect their users don't need development help or tooling support or developer ecosystems?
Have you heard of Blender? This is just straight-up silly, I don't know what else to say about it. FOSS projects and platforms have the same exact support and community needs as any proprietary service does.
No, I'm doubling down on challenging the author to be more audacious:
a) being honest with oneself and learning from failure (they call their project a "big success")
b) be more ambitious - building or contributing to yet another 3rd party Mastodon or Matrix client (both?) is just more noise in a crowded space going after a relatively small audience.
You've edited your comment since it was originally posted, but as a reminder, this is what I was responding to:
> If those communities and apps already respect their users, then do they need this author? What difference would they make?
Which is a pointedly ridiculous thing to say. No, you were not calling on the author to be more ambitious, this is silly.
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> b) be more ambitious - building or contributing to yet another 3rd party Mastodon or Matrix client (both?) is just more noise in a crowded space going after a relatively small audience.
Donation of time and effort to make platforms more attractive that you are ethically aligned with is not just "noise in a crowded space".
As if FOSS tooling was a crowded space!! These projects are desperate for volunteers, and lack of developer time and resources is one of the biggest handicaps that these projects often face. It is unquestionably valuable for people to volunteer effort in this direction.
It might not be flashy, it might not give you a giant userbase. But some people have different metrics of success than that, and high-impact activities often aren't flashy. You bring up building new projects as an alternative to donating to existing efforts. Yeah, that sounds very attractive and flashy, but there are a half-dozen FOSS platform alternatives to every proprietary service and we don't actually need more of them. What we need is for people to focus on a couple that already exist and make them as good as possible. It's less sexy, but it matters more.
thinking about eg the recent xz vuln, isn't this somewhat indicative of a licensing failure on the part of FOSS licenses? the point of licensing is to ensure the author is properly compensated for his work, and if the work is used by billion dollar companies while authors scrape by and beg for donations, it seems to me that the license isn't doing its job. the license should capture some value and give it to the author.
it's completely absurd that professional tooling is begging for volunteers. you don't see that in any other field.
I have opinions about the movement away from FOSS to source available licenses, but I think independent of all of that, smaller projects that fulfill important niches but that are not easily monetizable generally need help, and I don't think that would change if software licenses changed. Some projects could probably get better funding, but many would be in the same position.
I think in general there is more productive stuff to do in the world than there are people available to do it -- and I don't just mean in software, I mean everywhere. The world is held together by duck tape because a surprising small proportion of people volunteer to duck tape it together, and any effort that anyone expands towards helping them and making the world better instead of exclusively chasing whatever the next sexy high-visibility project is -- I think that's important, impactful work.
More specifically, why does there being some people that want those things mean something other than some people want those things? It almost sounds like you're trying to have a different conversation.
Projects that lack a reasonably sized market are fine, but their impact will be confined. It is a tradeoff you choose to make.
> More specifically, why does there being some people that want those things mean something other than some people want those things? It almost sounds like you're trying to have a different conversation.
Because if you want to have an impact, you should choose where and how to spend your time. You should pour a different amount of effort and resources into doing something for 1 person vs. 800 people vs. 1,000,000.
Which client do you use the majority of the time?
Or something it has that you would prefer if it were gone?
Matrix has been focusing more recently on trying to break some core functionality out into modules that can be imported -- encryption being the biggest example of this. Movement in that direction for video/audio would be a big deal. It's not just that Fluffychat needs help getting video working -- that would only leave them with another chunk of code to maintain. Ideally, they should be able to import a common library for this, but as far as I know, none exists that's usable for their needs.
Matrix video calls are a good example of this kind of ecosystem need in general -- Element had video calls before the spec actually supported video... because it used a Jitsi plugin. And that 3rd-party offering bought time for the spec authors to come up with more robust native support.
The problem is that 3rd-party clients offering the same support is still wildly complicated. There's a lot of room for improvement there.
All of the "legitimate" mailers have a disclaimer that says it can take up to X number of days before the changes take effect, which normal developers were obviously calling BS on.
The commenter said it wasn't intentionally written to be slow at his company but they deal with massive lists. But then the commenter said his company could probably make it faster or near instantaneous but when a user indicates that they want to unsubscribe from their spam they have gone from a potential source of revenue to being valued at zero. He complained that it made no sense to make the unsubscriber's lives better by immediately unsubscribing them instead of focusing his time on trying to make sure the spam got out to more people.
It was a thoughtful, rational comment that made me want to be a better developer instead of scum that makes the world worse.
I applaud the project author for not being scum.
Edit: andsoitis edited his comment after being downvoted. Here is the original reply I replied to.
" > I have to applaud taking even "failed" projects serious enough to come up with a reasonable exit plan (unlike some large companies).
That's time the author will never get back that they could have spent on their new mission.
Maybe it only took them 5 minutes, but I doubt it. Even if it was no time, it reveals a mental model that I think will continue to lead to their frustration.
When they say "This project is making the commercial web more bearable, but I'd rather spend my energy on making the non-commercial web more attractive." it is saying they would rather spend time making their 800 users get a soft landing spot for a product that the author has said is futile, than spend their energy on their new mission.
The next sentence I think is reveals more: "I want to support communities and applications that respect their users and value what we have to say." If those communities and apps already respect their users, then do they need this author? What difference would they make? "
For an industry (marketing) that is all about "intent", someone who doesn't want the marketing materials and won't buy and thus has a revenue value of zero and is making that intent clear by unsubscribing, it makes no sense to delay and possibly send more spam to them. It reeks of being driven by the wrong metrics, how many marketing emails were sent rather than how effective are the emails at converting to sales and unsubscribe requests should be informing how effective the emails are.
If I were a user of their project, which is free mind you, and they stopped it without a decent shutdown plan because after 2 years they could only get 800 users and they would rather use their life in a different way, I would not think of them as scum. To think someone like that is scum would be pretty toxic in my book.
"Act that you use humanity—whether in your own person or in the person of any other—always at the same time as an end, and never merely as a means."