@shel For what it's worth, if you know PHP, your contributions would be more than welcome in postActiv - I need all the help I can get.

@shel As for a more on-point comment, I always think of what Hintjens commented on this topic.  It is more important to onboard contributors, find the problems with their contributions as colloborative process than a combatative one, and you make a much healthier community by being permissive and inclusion with MRs and PRs than you than by trying to gatekeep them.  We all have the same goal when we work collectively on a software project: making the software better.  The tribalism, the "I know best" and the treading on your contributors to ego-trip, all sabotage that goal.

@shel Hintjens describes one of the paths to success as thus, and it's what I strive to be, if not always succeed at:

"The Constant Gardener grows a process from a small seed, step-by-step as more people come into the project. She makes every change for a precise reason, with agreement from everyone. She never imposes a process from above but lets others come to consensus, and then he enforces that consensus. In this way, everyone owns the process together and by owning it, they are attached to it.

@shel I feel that this is the path path to success, because if the community owns the project and their contributions, and they feel they have a place in and they are invested in seeing it continue and succeed.

@maiyannah Have you read the "Mourning Mastodon" essay that just got posted? It's about precisely this. Mastodon got popular precisely because the community felt like they owned the project and could affect it through contributions. so they got invested. and since the media boom that hasn't been the case anymore. It became a very toxic working environment, while working for free, and after a particularly rude comment i found myself going woah, why am i even doing this?