[JohnFen]

> How should you decide what to support if not having the information from your user?

There are many well-known and largely perfected methods of getting that information without the use of telemetry. The thing that general telemetry really brings is cost savings and convenience. But it also brings a peculiar kind of blindness as well, since companies largely stopped doing product research that isn't telemetry.

[simion314]

>There are many well-known and largely perfected methods of getting that information without the use of telemetry.

Can you link to a few of this many known methods? I am interested in ones that would fit open source projects that have no budgets for research. Thanks

[JohnFen]

Just look at how product development worked before telemetry was a thing that was possible, and how its done in other industries. This isn't hidden information.

[simion314]

OK, so you have no idea but you speak like you have plenty solutions. What I know of are things like Debian - https://popcon.debian.org , Ubuntu's https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport , Fedora's https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html/Deployme...

[gdfasfklshg4]

Telemetry is 100% not a viable fit for an open source project. A very significant proportion of your potential users will either keep it disabled or if that is not possible (which would be illegal in the EU anyway) not use your software.

Just ask your users.

[dwild]

> A very significant proportion of your potential users will either keep it disabled

Then they made the conscious choice that their usage won't get known and thus be aware that another way of communication will have to be used.

> Just ask your users.

"A very significant proportion of your potential users" won't tell what they want, or won't even know what they want. The one that will be the most vocal won't necessarily be the voice of reasons either.