Do you know why people use open source less often?

Because it's fucking difficult to get into it.

I've been running this instance for around 4 months.

I still don't know what half of anything does, and I don't even know WHAT I SHOULD ASK ABOUT.

It's very much "I made this thing and if I don't want to maintain it, it's someone else's problem"

I get it, you aren't officially getting paid.

I'm not either. And I don't have a job. I'm just trying to keep this damn thing running because there are people who use it

Could I have built this by myself?

Fugging no.

And I appreciate the work the open source community puts in.

But it, very often, shuts out minorities.

And it's really, really obvious when you're on the outside

@thatdelphox
Firstly you're right and it's a problem.

Secondly frequently the person who built it forgets all the things they had to learn to get where they are. It's why it good to document as you go, however if you didn't do that it can be very difficult to try and retrace your steps.

Thankfully OSS is a team effort, and if we communicate that documentation is a completely valuable way to contribute we'll see it.

@Vopo Honestly, I get that.

I would honestly say my biggest issue is, anytime a minority is like "Hey, it would help us out tremendously if we could get X feature" the immediate response tends to be "LEARN TO CODE" which, given that they may not remember the amount of things that they needed to learn to make the thing, makes it borderline impossible for someone to take "LEARN TO CODE" and actually figure out how to implement the thing.

Good to know there are teams that are trying to be better with documentation though

@thatdelphox Yeah, the traditional law of the land of Open source is loosely speaking "From each according to his need, to all" , but that really breaks down when we have whole groups of the population who have been prevented from filling their own need so to speak. Learn to code, also just as a statement alone doesn't actually help anything. In one of the opensource groups I'm in, they have a mentorship program. This I think is a better attempt, though incomplete.

@Vopo

[[I'm not angry or yelling at you, emphasizing without HTML or MD is hard haha]]

It's not even so much that, it's also how absolutely condescending it comes off as.

I UNDERSTAND HOW TO CODE

I'm not great at it, but I understand the underlying concepts.

I understand how to make the pieces fit together most of the time.

What I don't understand is WHY design decisions were made. I don't understand WHAT you called things and WHY you called them that.

"Learn to code" is a bad philosphy for many reasons.

@thatdelphox I think being with that person, helping them understand how they would build or add that feature themselves is a big first step. I suspect if you feel that way whoever told you that also feels that way especially if they were not the project maintainer.

It's a bad response though. They could have said, hey I don't know. I don't know how to do that.

@Vopo That's the thing.

"Hey I don't know how to do that thing" is a great answer. Especially if the person asking feels the person they're asking knows more about how to fix something.

I dunno, it's just frustrating and bluh.

@thatdelphox what were you trying to build/do?

@Vopo Nothing in particular this time.

Someone just said something that reminded me how shitty dealing with Open Source Culture was, and then that thread that was going around popped back up and then autism and salt took over

@Vopo Mostly, modifications on my instance have been a nightmare because nothing is documented correctly

@thatdelphox yea there should probably be a wiki that way people who use the software can actually write down what worked for them instead of waiting for some developer to get around to it, and then just write what they expected it to do instead of what it actually does, and then forget to update it because it's not a feature they use.

@Vopo That would honestly be a great idea tbh?

That way if you manage to hack it in, you could just update the wiki, and it's not "Hey cool I get to scream into the void or dig through a ton of code to find a single variable name or hardcoded number because no one could remember to write down what's what."

@thatdelphox https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation I'm going to suspect you've already read through this and found it unhelpful for your modifications?

@Vopo Yup yup.

That's the first thing I go through when I'm looking for specific changes.

@thatdelphox If you find some customization you want to add and can't do, lets figure it out and then add it to the documentation. Might also be worth starting a wikia, I suspect that garg didn't do that because he's afraid of misinformation, but wikis tend to be good. People love correcting people.

@Vopo It tru.

I've been trying to keep my fork updated, but commiting has been weird.

Plus the whole thing with Themes just not being a thing that work.

But I'll definitely try to help if I hack something in

@thatdelphox yeah git is easy 80% of the time and then you need to just do one small thing and you're using some arcane corner of the feature set that is just as complicated as the rest of it. I could probably help you with themes. What's your repo?

@Vopo I got the themes working, they just don't seem to push back to the repo for some reason, and I'm sure I'm just doing something wrong >^<

http://github.com/samanthaghraves/mastodon

@thatdelphox
git commit -am "a commit message"
git push origin master

gives you what error message?

@Vopo Well, figured out the problem I think?

It's trying to push to the default Mastodon instead of my fork.

Tho I thought I fixed that? Gimmie a sec

@thatdelphox oooohh

@thatdelphox

git remote -v

shows you your list of remote repositories.

git remote set-url origin https://github.com/samanthaghraves/mastodon.git

then to see that it worked

git remote -v

@Vopo Yay >^<

Modified the origin url and then everything pushed after I added the untracked files.

Thanks :3

@thatdelphox Glad I could help :).

@Vopo
Very appreciated :3

@thatdelphox I suspect you got in this sitch by changing the origin to pull down the newest changes. You can just do

git pull https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon.git master

@Vopo

That sounds about right honestly?

Good to know I can just pull for updates and not good with my settings

@thatdelphox I mean, the current maintainer has a patreon that brings in like 3200 a month

@odinsdream I was trying to keep it vague (This is in response to a toot that went viral and my just general irritance about OSC)

But yeah, you're not wrong.

"Everything is hardcoded and we won't default flex because 'design priniciples'" is a lot harder to be sympathetic when the guy is making 320x my monthly income basically

@thatdelphox like uh where's the committee of people running this brand new thing.... Where are the discussions about how PRs get prioritized... How community feedback is solicited and... Fuck. This is just off the top of my head

@odinsdream I mean, I originally left during the whole "BLOCKING INSTANCES IS BAD AND YOU SHOULDN'T DO THAT AT ALL GAIZ IT'S CENSORSHIP" BS was going on in response to Whitelisting (Which should be a damn option by default)

@thatdelphox I'm rolling my eyes so hard at that first bit you should be able to hear it from there

@odinsdream

I just keep giving this place chances, and I keep having to block a BUNCH of people who make/maintain/run the site because they're so oblivious to fugging everything.

@thatdelphox it's like. I dunno. There's something longer I think I wish I had organized in my head but the short version is we no longer operate in a world where it's sufficient to try and make community things happen responsibly without explicitly involving marginalized people throughout

@thatdelphox like you just can't claim you don't get it. That you think your best intentions or tech is enough.

@odinsdream Yeah, exactly.

if marginalized groups can't exist safely on your service, you're doing something TERRIBLY wrong.

@thatdelphox and like wow we are definitely able to find our way to exist wherever but it sure ain't fun

@thatdelphox at least not fun in the sense I think cishetwhitetechbros think of fun. Like "rad my programming skills are super innovative and I'm just delighted at the possibilities of this endeavor!!!"

@odinsdream Holy shit that's white

@odinsdream Yeah, it's definitely an issue.

I think my biggest source of confusion is the thought processes of "I want to build an open-source competitior to Twitter" and also "I'm going to completely ignore all input from the problems marginalized people have with twitter"

@thatdelphox ".... As my first step I will develop a short term plan to be a full time developer AND get $5k a month and that will definitely lead to no problems"

@odinsdream Absolutely no problems at all

@thatdelphox like just shut all the fuck up plzkthx

@odinsdream Pretty much sums up my feels on OSC

@thatdelphox can we just like fork this shit into an actual workers coop with a code of conduct and stuff

@odinsdream God that would be fantastic ngl

@thatdelphox haha kidding nobody would fund us cause there's already ONE DUDE to dump money on

@odinsdream ONE WHOLE DUDE

@thatdelphox like the tech savior mentality just drives me up the wall. The programming bit IS THE EASY PART OH MY GOD. The hard parts are being FUCKING RESPONSIBLE in how you engage with the world.

@thatdelphox and I'm in no way knocking an open source person for being able to do what they can to make money but WOW that.... That's something right there.

@odinsdream Yeah, I'm super happy when people can make a living building cool stuff. That part is great.

But there have been many times when the person in question basically said or did something that made me wonder if blocking a specific instance might be a good idea ngl

@thatdelphox
please do consider reading this for the other side of the story: https://toot.cafe/users/nolan/statuses/99383693187266672

@f0x That was actually the thread that inspired this, so I'm good friendo