the constant platform hopping is an indictment of the FOSS community
I will probably do a 'proper' full-size blogpost about this at some point, but for now this will have to do.
It saddens me immensely to see the tendency across the whole FOSS world to respond to issues with chat/code/etc. by proposing to just... move to a different one, that may or may not be open (and often isn't).
Is FOSS not supposed to be about collectively building open infrastructure, including our own meta-infrastructure? About removing that dependency on proprietary, user-hostile systems, such that we have the collective freedom to use our computers as we see fit, and collectively benefit from working together on that goal?
Then how is it justifiable to respond to platform and tech issues with "let's just use something else, we don't have time/money to fix this", when we *could* also be organizing across projects to all pitch in some work to improve the open thing? Where's the solidarity? Where's the collaboration? Where are all those ideals that people always talk about?
the constant platform hopping is an indictment of the FOSS community
@joepie91 a lot of people just... aren't programmers and don't really see how they could pitch in I guess
I'm... technically a UI designer and I could technically wok on and submit UI prototypes and stuff, but there's still the problem of not knowing if my contribution is gonna be welcome at all, and that's if I don't just think about how I need to fix up my website/portfolio first so I can prove that I am a designer so I don't just get dismissed as some rando who thinks she can fix the UI, stuff like that
the constant platform hopping is an indictment of the FOSS community
@hazelnot @joepie91 I think contributions by UI designers are a vital and extremely underrepresented group in FOSS. We need more people like you and I'm sorry to hear you feel excluded many projects should/would consider themselves lucky to have you. Lots of design work gets done by non-professionals.
projects usually have contribution guidelines/getting started pages and spaces for discussing development work. if you are interested in a project seek these things out and present yourself as a designer; ask where they need help. They also will have some open UI/UX based issues on their Github/Gitlab you can interact with and you can open your own after that.
followup, re: the constant platform hopping is an indictment of the FOSS community
To be clear: that doesn't mean that there can't be legitimate reasons to give up on a system and create something else. Governance issues, for example, are a real problem.
But such a decision should have specific *reasons*, and doesn't remove the need for collaboration - go organize a new thing with a couple of people from other projects who think about the problem space similarly!