Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Type of guy who lectures you on being "too abrasive, you won't convince people that way" with no knowledge of your history, and who really just felt personally called out despite the post not being addressed at them, and so tries to cover their discomfort instead of self-reflecting

@lnl Actually, I want to go into that a bit more in the general sense, because this is a big part of the problem I am venting about: looking for reasons not to do something. This is in response to you in this case, but I constantly see this from a lot of people.

It is really easy to find all sorts of reasons not to contribute to something. It requires almost no effort. It's much harder to find reasons *to* contribute to something. And yet, that is exactly what is necessary to actually make an open messaging platform happen.

I'm not saying you need to work with Element, or that there can not be a genuine conclusion of "this will never work in the context of an Element-governed project" after giving it a fair shot. But it's a problem when that gets extrapolated to "Matrix is hopeless".

Matrix is not just what Element decides it is, despite the formal governance structure. It is ultimately what the community recognizes as legitimate, that matters. Which means there are plenty of ways to work around Element. But *you do need to look for them*.

Saying "Element is bad and therefore Matrix is doomed" is not a valid reason. I'm sure it emotionally *feels* like a justification, but it's not - it's just the nearest and easiest plausible excuse to not do the work. And all it does is offload the work onto a nebulously-defined "someone else". The same applies for nearly every other reason people come up with for not contributing to Matrix.

You can't build and maintain a communal garden with that attitude, let alone an open messaging system. This is not how you build communities.

@lnl There is vastly more to Matrix than just that, and even when I have brought up a governance and protocol fork, there has been very little active interest, mostly just onlookers.

So I'm sure that it can be used as an argument not to work on stuff (like so many things), but it's not the reason that people aren't doing so.

This all kind of slots into a broader frustration I have about people having collectively unlearned how to take care of their communities, whether those are in their physical vicinity or online.

It's like people have mentally outsourced everything to corporations. Leading themselves to believe that if a company doesn't do it for them, it is not possible. This happens for so many things, not just software.

I'm kind of running out of patience for nerds complaining how Matrix is 'terrible' and making exactly zero effort to contribute towards any sort of improvement, even when explicitly invited to collaborate on an effort to do so. And often arguing for switching to proprietary platforms in a context where that really is not appropriate (eg. FOSS projects).

Yes, some people have a good reason to not be able to contribute. I refuse to believe that 100% of nerds are unable to do so. And a lot of the complaining has a very strong undercurrent of "everything must be served to me ready-made and I am unwilling to work to make my neighbourhood better, because that requires effort".

Hey, guess what, building a commons requires putting in work. How about you do your part in making the open platforms better? Instead of making demands of the, like, 5 people who are actually doing something useful about it?

(This was inspired by a comment elsewhere, but not a subtoot of it, this has been grating on me for years now)