Beginning to believe that @Gargron doesn't want me contributing to #mastodon — he's now partially recreated three of my pull requests that I've worked on.
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@thisismissem @Gargron This public callout is brave and not baseless, thank you Emelia for bringing up the issue and especially for your hard work... This is actually something that I've seen and last time when @renchap was wondering about why I'm hesitant writing some UI work or sending SVG stuff ideas to your way in a form of a PR, this is one of the reasons. If the huge time invested goes unnoticed or even exploited, its better to put your efforts to a fork or a mod instead.
The Mastodon core team should have a serious internal conversation about this. Doesn't really welcome anyone to contribute.
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@thisismissem It might be worth considering if forking (Potentially with the longer term view to hard fork) is the right call especially if you've been able to secure funding to date (or are able to do so from the general contributions you receive). There's enough folks out here (I think anyway) that are certainly interested in a lot of the improvements you've worked on to date to be appreciative of future development effort I think.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to Ryan Wild last edited by [email protected]
@wild1145 the contributions I receive to support my work are barely enough to pay me €20-30/hr for work done on Mastodon.
I definitely couldn't take on a fork alone, which is why I've been so active in trying to get changes made upstream.
In fact, I argued against hard forking here: https://medium.com/@thisismissem/why-a-hard-fork-of-mastodon-isnt-the-way-b37aecfe5c86
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@thisismissem That's fair and the blog post explains it really well. I think I tend to default to a "More options and competition = good" and as you summarise in that post, in this case it might not be.
I think I and a lot of folks got quite spoilt with some fairly major upgrades landing back in Q4 2022 where there were fairly major changes to Mastodon's design and UX and I personally had hoped for a faster pace on development, but equally do know there is a lot going on to keep things going.
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@thisismissem Though it is also a bigger shame just how many PR's and issues are sat open on the Mastodon project effectively rotting because they haven't been reviewed or looked at or dealt with, but then I can see both sides of it, spend all your time reviewing PR's and you get no big picture stuff done, but if you never review any nobody's going to submit PR's. It seems like it's a balance and I think it's fair to say Mastodon hasn't got the balance right yet.
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@wild1145 yeah, it's totally a balance, but like as a project lead the least you could do is look at the issues related to the thing you want to work on and see if there's anything that's needing review before duplicating work.
I get wanting quick wins, but a bunch of the stuff I've been working on is long-term getting us to a better place, there's reasons why the quick route isn't preferred.
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Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸replied to Emelia 👸🏻 last edited by [email protected]
@thisismissem Meh… any way you could provide to a smaller fork that moves quicker (like glitch-soc) to not just get some input but also show them to the public to perhaps raise pressure? Perhaps it will even spark interest in another *stable* fork of Mastodon with better governing. Eugen seems to be a rather bad project lead.
Your work is direly needed and extremely appreciated by the whole community!
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@Natanox my stance has always been to try to get work upstream, because the project is complex enough that divergent forks would be hell to maintain
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@thisismissem If your PR addresses problems his PR won't, is it possible to restructure your PR in a way it improves things without causing conflict, on top of his changes? (It will probably be more work to do so, so if you don't want to do that, I think that's fair, though.)
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@thisismissem @Natanox speaking as someone who as...watched this same cycle (and worse) happen to developers that aren't you...
...it's not just you. Gargon seems to be de-prioritizing effective moderation, and has been for a while...
...maybe consider that glitch-soc is a viable upstream-enough, given the known toxicity of the upstream Mastodon project maintainer.
It's not just you. And it's not you. You're doing good work, and genuinely being dealt with in an inconsiderate way. Hope you keep contributing, one way or another.
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@pot the conflicts would be so large and my work has existed well before his. I'm happy to take things back from his into mine or rebase the bits that I can, and I'd already offered that on the first instance of a conflicting PR, then he turned around and worked on an issue I'd literally told him that morning that I'd been working on & needed input from the team.
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@thisismissem @EveHasWords if this happened at my company to *any* member of the team, and wasn’t directly addressed by leadership, I would be looking for a new job. IMO this is a big red flag for the sustainability of mastodon.
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@thisismissem @gargron oh what, that would be much more useful than what there is now, and also much better than what he’s done. It sucks having to click through, often multiple times to actually see context etc, adding bulk actions won’t help where he has it at all.
Thanks so much for trying, I can definitely understand why you’re frustrated by this -
@kate @thisismissem @Gargron It is so frustrating to have PR’s remaining open for long. This is the most unproductive situation.
Personally I way more prefer to review code in a synchronous manner with my peers. But with large open source projects, I understand this becomes difficult if not impossible. -
@kate @thisismissem @Gargron You can own a project or be at the origin of a project. But if you open source it, you have to play the game. If changes need to be done before being merged, give a reason, discuss, exchange and come together to some outcome.
Moving projects forward is all about collaboration. -
@wild1145 @thisismissem we merge 250-300 PRs in a good month. Yes many of those are small, but it already takes a big part of the team’s time (which is still 2.5 people). We are trying to see how to improve this but PRs are opened at a faster rate than what we manage to process, even if we focus on them. So either we should merge without reviewing as much (bad) or have more people to review them (hard)
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@thisismissem I had read about similar things happening years ago, but was really hoping the project had grown out of it.
I wish you the best and I hope it can be resolved amicably still. -
@CatherineFlick the direction I'd probably take for bulk actions is like an "add to cart" as you review reports, then at the end you go "yeah, these were all about that spam we dealt with, close"
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@renchap @wild1145 right and I'm always happy to wait for reviews; what I'm not happy about is seeing stuff I put a lot of time & energy into getting duplicated for no good reason, especially when that person could've paid attention to the issues I'm working on years before I started my work, but didn't so much as even triage the tickets.
