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Do you ever get scared of being eating up by a community for reporting problems. (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by mtchristo@lemm.ee to c/foss@beehaw.org

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Have you ever been scared or hesitant about reporting flaws or bugs to a community with a strong staunch fanbase ??

Obviously there are different ways of reporting and starting discussions, but I brought up the courage to report a flaw on a subreddit (not to be named) that I knew is very sensitive to criticisme, and I was flooded with downvotes and even was subject to gaslighting, so I gave up on that software and became even more hesitant about reporting problems on other FOSS communities .

Is this mindset very prevalent among all open source communities? have you faced something similar ?

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[–] Rentlar@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Keep in mind that the question is presented will affect how it is responded to as well. I, for one, get very defensive when people act all entitled expecting the world and the moon for free from FOSS developers. Here's the difference:

Good:

I've been trying out [software], but I've been having a problem with [issue].

Thanks for your work on [software]. I'm having trouble using [feature] because of [issue]. I tried a number of things to solve it, [troubleshooting steps] but no luck.

[Software] has been having an issue lately with [issue] when I do [recreation steps]. Does anyone know the problem and how it can be fixed?

Bad:

Why isn't [issue] with [software] fixed already?

When are we going to get [feature]~~~~~

[Software] is completely unusable until they get [issue] fixed. (This may be true, but what kind of motivation do these kinds of comments give the developer to fix them?)

Someone help! [Software] isn't working! It's showing an error! (No real description of what happened, how it happened, no effort shown to help the developer fix the problem)

So all in all it's about tone for me. I'm happy to guide people, but bad tone puts me off a bit in wanting to help them.

[–] mtchristo@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I get it, but my complaint wasn't as much about project developpers as it is about the project fanbase.

I totally respect all the efforts involved into making open source software, my gripe was with how to communities do resist change or criticisme sometimes.

[–] Mane25@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago

With open source it is "community software", and if this aspect of it is strong then the line between users and developers can be blurred somewhat, ordinary users may feel attached in a similar way as developers, so @Rentlar@beehaw.org's suggestions could still apply for getting a better response from the community.

Some communities also have to deal with a lot of demanding, entitled people (which I'm not labelling you as) and so may have set the defensive threshold a little high, and so coming across as being constructive about the project goes a long way.