Well, I think that everyone is replaceable. I saw it in our company. Over the last years we often had situations where coworkers left and we thought: "Now we are doomed! No one know that product, the customers will kill us!". Until now this hadn't happen.

Concerning the reward: recently I received several kilograms of chocolate from a user. So that's fine 😀

... projects driven exclusively by individual volunteer enthusiasts in their spare time) and/or try to strive for actually _getting_ to a point where this sustainability is even possible. Like: What would it take to make FairEMail, Friendica, Pleroma, Diaspora, ... more "sustainable" than, in example, Twitter or Flickr that have been around for 10+ years...? 2/2

@heluecht @cketti @csepp

The simple answer is that it would take a particular astral alignment. FLOSS is organic, with a mostly horizontal structure that doesn't allow for central planning at all. More generally, nothing can be expected to last forever, neither corporate platforms nor FLOSS alternatives, so a better question should be "what kind of platform do I want to be on right now" and "what is my contingency plan is when the platform I'm on inevitably declines/disappears?".

The story of Google+ is a good example both of a corporate platform disappearing, and of the flexibility of its former users who found their solace again, either on the Fediverse or elsewhere. Your home on the Social Internet may move, but at the end of the day you're still you.

How did we manage to get things such as Wikipedia, Debian or larger GNU/Linux distributions to "fly"? Of course at least Linux, too, is suffering from fragmentation and having way too many different "just because" - reimplementations of virtually everything, but maybe in the last couple of years we just unlearnt how to focus on shared goals? I'm not sure here, and maybe this sounds more harsh than it is intended to, yet still it feels quite ... weird.

@heluecht @csepp @cketti

That's an obvious question, but I'd like to ask you another one to provide some perspective. For each stable project like Wikipedia or main Linux distributions, how many other projects didn't make it? We weren't better at focusing on shared goals before, it just that only the memory of surviving projects remains from that time. It's called survivor bias and it often leads to the wrong conclusions regarding the success of any endeavor.

I get your need for stability, but so much of success is about being at the right time in the right place that individual behavior matters very little in the long run, so the best you can do is cheer on the projects you like and plan for a move if they fall apart.

that's a total passive view of social change/challenge

Are you a fan of #pomo am cureuse about people who think like this - it's very #mainstreaming while often seemingly being radical.

It's kinda why we are in such a mess I think, what do you think?

"If it improves things, it's worth doing."

My issue with this phrasing is that, especially for non-code contributions, you can't possibly know if and how it will improve things. So there's the risk of overthinking it while not doing anything like in this thread. Just do the things you like doing is plenty enough already, project stability be damned.

There's a fundamental difference between a paid job burnout and an open source burnout though. In the former case, the pressure is external, applied by the employer. In the latter case, the pressure is entirely self-applied. If someone self-assigns the mission to maintain a particular project even to the detriment of their own well-being, I don't see any guidelines/CoC that can prevent that.

Since it's entirely dependent on a developer self-awareness, external input matters very little because if a developer doesn't realize they are spending more time/emotional work than they are ready to until it's too late, what are the chances people who know them even less would?