@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?

@shel I'm going to assume Mastodon's glorious conversation stitching failed, I was replying to your post about it originally.

@maiyannah it said you were replying to my post about leaving mastodon development, though also I'd be impressed if you'd read that essay that quickly while talking to me hehe. So I wasn't sure.

@shel I read it over before strarting to reply.  The one from Allie Hart, yeah?  Just to be sure we're on the same page.

@maiyannah yup, that one

@shel This bit stood out to me in particular: 

"What do I mean by justice? Simply this: that the community which produced and shaped the Mastodon phenomenon be recognized for their efforts, allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and given the opportunity to continue to play a meaningful role in its development"

That kind of hurt the soul to read.  I've been burnt in the past in a /big/ way with that by a project I don't want to name because I ended up burning the handle I used to contribute with, it went about that well.  It was a cry not for fame or money but for sheer recognition for their contribution.  Erasure is a shit, shit thing.

@maiyannah and yeah recognition and gratitude. respect and appreciation. it goes a long way. to see your work implemented and used and to be told that you did a good job and given guidance on how to get better, where you need to improve, that's a great experience. without it you get left with merely having your work merged as your reward.... the prize for your work is the work not going to total waste. it's not the best environment

@shel Did you see the bit where they basically reimplemented one of animeirl's contributions without credit?  That was nasty.

@maiyannah I didn't. i dont think that even gets thought about. people aren't attached they're just sources of code. i didn't get credited for my welcome modals simply because the pull request was squashed before merging, so my commits got erased. and so then when git log got run to generate the contributor list, i was absent. even though I had made one of the most visible contributions. it was infuriating.

@maiyannah and then because i still had write access on the repo i added myself to the contributor list w/o making a PR, which got my write access revoked it seems

@shel Now that, is malicious.  It's one thing to make a mistake or have a technical failure, or just forget or not care.  To actively take away someone's tools for trying to be attributed for their work though, that's rotten.

@maiyannah like i don't know if it's directly connected but the last thing i wrote to the repo was adding my name to the contributor list in the tagged release description. but like that was before I submitted my PR to fix design-breaking changes to my modals, which was titled "Repair most egregious mistakes in onboarding modals" because i was so mad when i wrote it. Someone told me to be polite and I said "I'm writing a PR, is that not polite enough for you? I could just commit"

@shel I think this continued to escalate ultimately because of a lack of leadership.  The way I look at it, the lead dev/maintainer is the person that bullshit on both/all sides of a conflict should end at.  They are the facilitator, and ultimately when neccessary, the peacemaker.