This is why I dislike people badgering the Lemmy devs for whatever they feel is currently important to them. “Ermagerd, it’s GDPR violation!!!1!!!1!!111”. Or people flaming the developer(s) of Mastodon for not implementing quoting “Twitter has it, so you must implement it for people coming from Twitter!”. And so on and so forth.
We should all be doing what we can to help opensource developers and that also means calling out shitty behavior from its users or external contributors towards maintainers. Maintainers aren’t messiahs and just humans too, so them being cunts isn’t nice either (obviously), but I have much more understanding for their behavior sometimes. Especially when hundreds of entitled keyboard warriors attack maintainers and write blog articles about them (like wedistribute.org) demanding stuff be done their way.
Maintainers also need better tools and features from giants like github to shutdown annoying users on their projects. Github’s “social” features need a lot of work. It’s not possible to have moderators (human or automatic provided by the platform) for projects for example. Instead maintainers have to read all the bullshit demands people have expressed with no filter.
When the maintainer of actix stepped down due to harrassment by rust purists (he used the unsafe keyword) and there was an outpour of support, it felt so ridiculously fake. It had been going on for a while and there were reddit threads, blog posts, tweets, and other cries on social media by the purists that amounted to harrassment, but only when the maintainer stepped down did people affected react.
I’m by far no angel, but at least my claim to fame isn’t abusing maintainers enough for them to quit.