this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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This is ridiculously petty from the devs, and does make me seriously wonder about Lemmy's future.
Idk if they care about a particular thing FOOS devs are often petty. I don't think it's actually a threat to the project. Like read unix mailing lists from Linus or whoever else, it can get downright toxic. e.g.:
"BULLSHIT. Have you looked at the patches you are talking about? You should have - several of them bear your name. [...] As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE. [...] WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON? " here
I think Linus gets away with a lot because the value Linux delivers is pretty out of this world.
Being rude to people trying to contribute in good faith seems like a way to send them to a competitor and if one exists, that doesn’t bode well for the project.
Opening an issue that is a feature request is hardly a contribution, especially if there are few full time devs it might be a distraction more than a contribution, and there is like 1 open source competitor.
Ideas are free, finished working code is expensive, if the devs think they can't get to it in the next N years they probably just don't want to see it.
As I said I don't buy how this would be an actual problem, maybe it's rude but who cares, the admin is essentially an end user demanding something, at the end of the day he can write it himself or stfu. The devs time will certainly be spent better almost anywhere else than arguing on a GitHub issue.
Did you look at the subject at hand? It wasn't a feature request, it was an a bug issue that had been opened by the programming.dev admins back when there were issues with the instance not federating. It seems to me like OP was providing context(after the issue was mysteriously resolved) and the Lemmy dev lost his cool.
The one linked by snowe above and is the cause of this is on a feature request but its not a feature request made by snowe, its one made by dessalines.
All of snowes comments got collapsed due to getting marked as off topic which seems to be making people think hes dessalines when thats another lemmy dev
Snowe in the thread explaining it
The bug report is a different thing from this (although now snowe cant comment on that thread due to being banned and everything there and in some other spots such as a pull request I was making are also marked as off topic). Probably will get resolved by dessalines based on dessalines comment but weve got Pangora being built up as well
If ideas are free, why do Fortune 500 companies routinely bribe their customers to tell them about the experience so far?
Because feedback from people using your software is valid and valuable. Feedback from power users of your software (admins of instances) is even more valuable.
I understand why you feel the way you feel, but this isn’t how a healthy project is run.
You say the devs time would be better spent developing and I agree. Interesting that they took time out of their day to issue a ban and then come here to weakly defend it. It’s almost like they could have just ignored the OP and none of this would have happened.
In the first part I disagree, fortune 500 aren't looking for ideas they are gathering data, the difference here is one of quantity. And they will at least usually not gather free form things unless they have significant resources to commit to sorting through it. Or it's specifically payed support.
Feedback is valuable only if actionable, if the feedback can't be acted on because one dev largely already said yes and the other one largely thinks there is more important stuff right now it's not actionable. That's why companies have teams specifically for market research or marketing or whatever, they don't usually let the devs gather it themselves. And in the case of big open source projects with full time staff handling the issues on the GitHub might be partially done by a not dev team. Or a dev team member that's not a dev themselves.
Yes the dev can choose to spend time bickering about this here, I don't really care and I never said he should develop instead, I might think it's stupid but again who cares. Ignoring would perhaps have been better but blocking for 7 days is almost like ignoring, just that the trigger is blocked for 7 days as well, completely reasonable to do if it was actually annoying, and it might've been considering it was two largely unnecessary comments.
I even agree with you that the devs seem sorta toxic and maybe their project management style is unhealthy, but they are devs, as long as they continue to develop a reasonable software who cares how it's run. They are not pr or even project managers, they are devs, maybe they chose their job by what they can do and just ended up having to do the community management on GitHub as well because their software is open source.
If they actually had active control over the future of the software in the general sense, i.e. if it was closed source i would be concerned with the characters running the project. But it's open source, the future doesn't depend on specific devs, it's explicitly set up so that the current devs could die or delete it or whatever, and in response anyone willing could create a fork with a scheduler and anything else they might want, it even works with a federated approach so any fork would be backwards compatible.