Recent events have made me realise something.
In the early days, when PieFed was tiny (it’s still tiny I guess) me being really engaged with the community was a huge strength. I knew immediately what was going on and could release a fix/change really fast and people loved that. In contrast it made the other projects and their devs seem slow and distant.
It worked great. For quite a while.
But now PieFed has thousands of users and there are haters and there are bugs and there are feature requests, etc etc and now what used to be a strength has become a danger and a weakness. Me jumping onto every issue and responding every time someone @ rimu’s me drags me into stuff, destroys my focus and leaves me on the verge of burnout. If people can troll me into behaving erratically (they can!) then it stalls my work and when I behave badly it makes the whole project look bad.
Now I understand why larger projects’ devs keep some distance. It’s the only way to keep working while the storm rages outside.
It looks like I’m going to have to put in some insulating layers between me and the wider fediverse. Defined communication channels for feature requests, places to report bugs, delegate to others some/more of the community management, put together a FAQ and more docs, and so on.
There will have to be some debates, issues and conspiracy theories that are left alone and not debunked by me personally. Internet chatter is just not something I can be putting as much time into as I used to. Realistically that point was passed months ago but I lacked the experience needed to spot it at the time.
Although unpleasant for me personally this growth is a good problem for PieFed to have. It just means my focus and strategy needs to change, to protect my attention & energy and serve the community as well as I can over the long term.
@piefedadmin@join.piefed.social you have built a great platform, to keep piefed healthy your #1 priority is yourself.
@piefedadmin best wishes in that endeavour!
hopefully quite a few fedi/FLOSS projects have had this issue already and can provide some tips regarding how they handled it and mistakes they made that you could avoid 🤞
@piefedadmin
Check out how we do this on inkscape. A unique system called inbox that allows us to recruit non programmers to help sort, digest and move issues around. We let users say whatever they want in the inbox, incl features and complaints.
But as a Dev I don't see most of the noise.
That’s very interesting. Our codeberg issue queue is creaking under the load (already) and it’d be good to get more systematic about it. Thanks!
This is a wise move. It would be a full time job to respond to everyone, and why dev jobs insulated developers behind the product team. Thank you for the good work!