hot take, FOSS
@Foxboron@chaos.social @thibaultmol Actual sustainable grassroots community building, actively engaged contributors and internal social relations, collective consideration of the values behind a project and who benefits from it. In other words, sustainable social and governance structures.
Structures that actually make space for people and their needs, and that give them a reason to stick around beyond "there is Work to be done".
Not drive-by PRs that generate more work than they remove and that function as maintainer time sinks, "tech is politically neutral" whitewashing, licensing obsessions, corporate source dumps and labour exploitation, and so on.
hot take, FOSS
@Foxboron@chaos.social @thibaultmol And Github and its model do not fit into that picture; they are entirely designed around corporate workflows, corporate needs, hierarchical power structures, and so on.
The system does not make any room for community or collective governance whatsoever.
hot take, FOSS
@joepie91 @Foxboron @thibaultmol
twitter takeover helped as well. advertising and even offering NFTs integration into profiles, but mainly dispersing ppl and disrupting well functioning communication infrastructure.
the weaknesses back then were the centralized pillars
1. twitter for communication
2. github for work
3. npm for publishing
also - that ppl still need income and open source was not sustainable for them which burnt out many.
if we want to reboot we need to consider
hot take, FOSS
@Foxboron@chaos.social @thibaultmol Also, here's a concrete example of what 'making room for collective governance' might look like: whoever 'owns' a particular issue ('assignee', in Github lingo) also automatically has full moderation rights over the conversation in that issue, and multiple separate conversations can be had within its context.
hot take, FOSS
@joepie91 @Foxboron @thibaultmol
i agree with the criticism.
my personal experience is open sourcd was winning until around ~2017ish +/- some years, when microsoft and other established industry players (who were already preparing) came out massively with web3/shitcoins stealing open source contributors from the general movement, making noise, disrupting and over the years also buying github, npm and establishing vscode to take over critical infrastructure pieces.