Sadly, complaining seems to be one of the activities that people like to do the most. I understand the frustration of dealing with negativity, especially when you’ve poured immense effort into developing Lemmy over the years. However, embracing a Complaint-Driven Development approach could help turn critiques into opportunities for improvement. One way to facilitate this could be to establish a set of transparent rules or guidelines on how you prioritize issues and feature requests. This transparency can help manage expectations and foster a more collaborative relationship with the users in your community. While not all complaints may be actionable, actively listening to feedback and explaining your prioritization criteria could go a long way in building trust and goodwill. Open communication and a willingness to consider diverse perspectives can lead to a stronger, more user-centric product in the long run.
Comment on The playground schematic analogy for designing a fediverse service.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 months agoLook at it this way: I’ve spent almost every single working day for the past four years developing Lemmy. I implemented the entire federation logic and much more. Most days and nights I think about ways to improve Lemmy and it’s not easy to shut off. Especially during the Reddit blackout it was extremely stressful as we were completely bombarded with requests, I didn’t even have time to keep up with all the issues.
Yet last week some individuals came along who never made any contributions to Lemmy and never showed the slightest gratitude for my work. They essentially what I’m doing is wrong and that they should be in charge of decisionmaking for Lemmy. One Beehaw admin even said that all my work on Lemmy is meaningless.
I know you and many others have good intentions with your criticism. But after all the negativity of last week I simply don’t have the mindset to accept any of it.
The_Lemmington_Post@discuss.online 2 months ago
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Mate trust me I understand all about Foss stress and burnout. I’ve been doing Foss for way longer than 4 years and the ai horde has been very demanding as well (and I also have a day job and small children) . But through all this, you have to learn to keep your cool. It’s sometimes better to just come out and say “people, I’m close to burnout and I can’t comment now” or “I am going to work on this as fast as I can but if someone can get to it first feel free” etc. It’s way better to explain that you’re overworked than to attack people. It’s also OK to say nothing at all than to go on the offensive. People can understand the former but the latter will never work the way you expect.
I keep saying that this is a pure communication issue. I (and many others like sunaurus) can clearly see you’re working hard and we understand how much there is to do, and this is why I’m dismayed when I see you escalate.
If you want we can get in a voice chat and I can share how I deal with these situations and what has worked for me. Just pm me. I really think this is made unnecessary harder than it needs to be.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Thank you for the offer but its not necessary. Ive also maintained open source projects long before Lemmy so Im familiar with the occasional entitled user on Github. In my experience its not a good idea to make any promises to these users because they will view their entitlement as justified, and make more demands.
However its a completely different quality when its not just Github comments, but multiple blog posts within a few days attacking Lemmy and me personally. Sure my responses were not ideal, but it was the best I was capable of at that time. If I had said nothing, people would assume that all the accusations are true and I have nothing to defend myself (like the claim that Im a “tankie” which has been going around on Mastodon for years).
In any case I think its better to say something and get my view out rather than being quiet. Sure there are miscommunications but those can be cleared up, and I can learn how to communicate better in the future. On the other hand if I said nothing, I may be left with the impression that my work sucks, and lose all motivation to keep working on Lemmy. Then I would be stuck doing nothing at all. Luckily that hasnt happened, Im still working on the project like before.