We moved from GitHub to Gitlab and the rate at which new contributors found the project effectively halved. We had a Matrix at some point and one person used it. The reality is you have to pick your battles.
That's fine and I understand; and I'm cool if projects have multiple ways to make contributions. What I hate is when open source projects only exist and allow communications on closed platforms.
We also have forum.2009scape.org, which is open source. Any questions people have are only answered here, for the explicit purpose of better searchability of answers.
(But people hate registering on new sites)
Trust me, I know what you're saying. We did our best, but ended up deciding to focus on the project, rather than a larger movement as a whole
Gamers 😤 For what it's worth, more users, especially on a gaming-related project probably the effort providing basic support faster than it increases contributions.
The network effect is a real problem tho. Hopefully ForgeFed & Gitlab implementing ActivityPub will help with this. Same with OAuth with GitHub as the SSO provider.
Bridging Matrix seems like the best of both, but takes a lot more work.
I'm a purist, so if I see a project uses Discord, I'll immediately start looking for viable alternatives.
We do, but people don't come over. It's a service issue; if the goal is maximize contributors, you need to minimize friction. A mirror minimizes friction, but it's still a significant step over "just being on Github":
That's a shame. If GitHub didn't have their own pull request system (or at least did it the way git does) I would have suggested maybe finding a way to allow PRs from GitHub.
I'm an open source maintainer part-time. My God how I've wanted to call so many people "idiot" straight to their face.
I don't blame some people for turning bitter. You wouldn't have much faith in humanity left either, after closing your 100th duplicate issue with a solution that sums up to "read the fucking docs".
I was talking to a friend recently who was frustrated because they felt like tech support had been treating them like an idiot. They're a reasonably techy person and had gone through all the troubleshooting steps in the documentation, but the person on the phone had them do it all again. I tried to explain the perspective of the tech support guy — the fact that people often refuse to restart their PC because it feels like too simple of a step and they feel patronised by the suggestion, to the extent that people lie about whether they've done a particular troubleshooting step.
I told them that it was valid to feel frustrated with how long the call took when it could've been much quicker and simpler, but that they should attribute their frustration at people who repeatedly refuse to read the docs, rather than the tech support guy. My friend wasn't an idiot, but they were tarred with the same brush because of how many people seeking tech support are belligerent idiots.
