Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@rogueren I think it was a mistake to ask existing maintainers to review the Rust abstractions for their subsystems.

On paper that makes sense, due to the magic undocumented semantics since the docs are terrible. But that only works if those maintainers are actively helpful and willing to learn new things and see things from a different perspective.

We'd have been better off designating Rust maintainers for each subsystem and not allowing the C maintainers to gatekeep everything. Then they can choose to help review and get the semantics right, or not. But they wouldn't have the power to just block everything and force things to be done "their way" or delay merging until everything goes through an agonizing process that boils down to teaching how Rust is supposed to work to someone who doesn't want to learn.

For subsystems with helpful maintainers, the outcome would have been the same, since they'd cooperate anyway (and maybe even sign up to maintain the Rust side). And for subsystems with unhelpful maintainers, this would have avoided a lot of pain, and not given them the power to derail the project.

I wish folks would stop equating size of userbase with "success" of platform, it's never been an interesting metric to look at unless you're talking about megaplatforms that need millions and millions of people so they can just about break even by selling data and eyeballs.

Back in the forum days nobody worth taking seriously was anxious about getting millions of people onto a forum, were they? And those forums weren't "failures" because of that, cuz they still connected people with similar interests together.

Stuff like user safety, fun, sustainability, and sense of community seem more interesting to talk about, to me, when evaluating whether a space is worthwhile to engage with. Raw numbers are boring.