> The operators, who to some degree help the project gain visibility, support, and money, are themselves doing unpaid labor
This! ☝️ ☝️ ☝️
Whenever I hear a developer of a big, popular project ignore outright or lash out against reasonable feature requests with "we are doing this in our own time" or "well you are getting the software for free", I want to shout back "you are getting our advocacy and user tech support for free!"
It's a messy situation, and I'm also led to think about how a bunch of us are, in a sense, all paying out pennies to each other's Patreons and OpenCollectives and GoFundMes. It paints a picture in my head of the poor and starving trying to support the poor and starving, with very little new money actually entering the pool.
@deadsuperhero Poor governance has been a serious issue with Lemmy for awhile from what I can tell and it is the main reason I have never had any interest in setting up a Lemmy instance, not (just) because it is "half baked" software not yet suitable for production IMO.
Same reason I never went to Pleroma...serious governance concerns even though in that case the software was actually pretty good quality.
Look if you like writing software for fun and want to share your work fine, but if you only want to do the "fun stuff" (or that is all you can manage) then probably best not to lead a formal project and instead just participate as a contributor.
@deadsuperhero There's always a push and pull with this.
We keep coming back to the idea of what labour is more valuable in our community software. When the truth is all labour should be valued.
Code, documentation,community using your software, bug reporting, the unpaid labour of folks helping other folks using the software. Trust and Moderation. It all takes people's time and energy and for a project to be a healthy project, that time needs to be valued.
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