The social media-izing of open source has been a massive blow. Projects and contributors across the board are randomly bombarded with mob harassment.
Return to Cathedral.
Return to Cathedral.
They were like that in the 90's, and tons of them never acknowleckged their mediocrity against, well, serious systems.
Amiga diehard fanboys and microcomputer owners were like that with tons of 'secretive' software, too.
In my country (Spain) tons of people tolk about the 'Golden Age' of the Spanish software, were 90% of it was pure crap against what the French and the Brits where producing even for the ZX, not to mention what the Japanese did with the MSX.
A community built on snobbism and spoiled kids. Then when the international scene (the serious one) compares their IF 'work' against The Hobbit or, worse, isometric games (not the ones made with an infamous engine, the ones with amazing artwork and free roaming), the whole deck of cards collapses.
What does this mean?
Of course, I always like to point out the foolishness of this metaphor: Bazaars in the Near East were usually run in a fairly regimented fashion by merchant guilds and their elected or appointed leaders.
The Cathedral example was actually GNU, which is Not Unix (it's in the name!).
This in contrast to the somber atmosphere of a cathedral where people whisper even when there are no services taking place at the time. It’s an image of reverence, humility, and monumental architecture.
My general impression is that the abuse in the past tended to concentrate in a few well known figures, who often got banned on sight or at least generally carried little to no real influence. Or it concentrated in particular toxic projects which you could just avoid. A little bit of abuse wrangling contributed to project cohesion.
Today it's more like an intermittent firehose, with clueless mobs being weaponized from other platforms. Performances being made in issue trackers and pull requests for offsite audiences, and just a particular depth and relentlessness of harassment that was uncommon decades past.
It's the scale that makes banning the "few well known figures" on sight hard. The method of communication (mailing list vs. GitHub vs. Discord vs. whatever) doesn't really matter all that much, at least not for this particular problem.
I suppose "ignore some asshole in your email" is easier, and also hard to pile on comments in a private email box. But beyond that, I'd say having an issue tracker is a net positive, as is the ability to create PRs easily.
I wouldn't say that "social media-izing" is a good way to describe any of that, but I understand what you mean.
The main problem is probably more "brigading" from Twitter/X/Mastodon/Facebook/whatnot.
There is a continuum between totally private and what github provides, with self hosted tools you could hit a number of different spots on that spectrum. Cynically one reason for the lack of flexibility is that the maximally permissive side is probably better for the expansion of Github's business.
The major problem: With any idea around decreasing all that social media circus, and coming back to the actual things a bit more, you lose entire generations of human beings nowadays whose only reason to exist, whose only driver, whose only source of energy, is their smartphone with the right social media silo apps installed.
It's at least a decade too late to stop that apocalypse. It will not get better before a big boom suddenly forces them from outside. Our societies are obviously not strong and not resilient enough for more than a few decades of existance before it makes boom.