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1. Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jan-2018 14:00:10 EST Nolan

   Being an open-source maintainer is really hard. A lot of people tend to act very entitled towards you, as if you "owe" them your time or your attention.

   It's totally illogical: you put something out there for free, and now because of that, folks feel like they deserve more of it! And yet this is often the prevailing mood in OSS communities.

   At the same time, you may start to believe this logic yourself, leading to "open-source guilt." This often ends in burnout.

   1. Drew DeVault (sir@cmpwn.com)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jan-2018 14:37:40 EST Drew DeVault

      in reply to

      @nolan I can totally relate. My solution is to hardly provide support at all to users - but I provide plenty of support to contributors. Everyone who contributes to my projects has their own agenda and their own list of things that are important to them (including me) and if there aren't any devs whose interests align with a user enough to fix their bug or implement their feature then that user is encouraged to write a patch themselves.

   2. june (odinsdream@octodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jan-2018 15:13:57 EST june

      in reply to

      @nolan this report examines the effect of this issue at scale:

      https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/