For me at least, the burnout comes from the fact that I want to code, not troubleshoot. I want to make new features, build snazzy front ends, and not have to worry about money.

But as lemmy's gotten more popular, a big chunk of my time is spent doing the things the article mentions: responding to an endless stream of notifications that builds faster than you can close them, helping debug people's system setups, address people's odd use-case pet features they want, and troubleshoot other issues.

Many times people can be very rude, not realizing they're asking you to do free labor for them. Its very similar to how some people treat restaurant servers as their personal servants.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago

It helps a lot to realize that we are not obligated to respond to anyones issue. Wee are providing a software for free, and if sonething cant get it working, thats their problem. They can just not use it, or pay someone for help. Just because I wrote some software doesnt mean I owe anyone an explanation how it works.

In this regard I think it will be helpful if we aggressively close any support requests on Github, and tell people to ask on Lemmy/Matrix, where other people can help them.