In recent days, the discussion around Lemmy has become a bit...spicy. There's a few points of impact here. To list some examples: Beehaw being frustrated enough to ponder leaving the software Sublinks being started out of uncertainty with the lemmy roadmap Drama about inability to delete images and lemmy dev reactions to the priority request [...]
It’s obvious that people are indeed doing or thinking of doing just that. Don’t get complacent just because things have not changed yet. There is a threshold to cross and once it crossed, things change very very fast. Currently there’s no software out that is as mature as lemmy, but if the trust thermocline is breached, people will prefer to switch to something substandard than support a project they don’t believe anymore.
Your biggest benefit as FOSS developers is your community goodwill. I can’t stress enough how much you need to be careful on what you say and how you communicate to maintain it.
Look at it this way: I’ve spent almost every single working day for the past four years developing Lemmy. I implemented the entire federation logic and much more. Most days and nights I think about ways to improve Lemmy and it’s not easy to shut off. Especially during the Reddit blackout it was extremely stressful as we were completely bombarded with requests, I didn’t even have time to keep up with all the issues.
Yet last week some individuals came along who never made any contributions to Lemmy and never showed the slightest gratitude for my work. They essentially what I’m doing is wrong and that they should be in charge of decisionmaking for Lemmy. One Beehaw admin even said that all my work on Lemmy is meaningless.
I know you and many others have good intentions with your criticism. But after all the negativity of last week I simply don’t have the mindset to accept any of it.