[ddevault]

Our IRC channel is open, and many people watch and participate in discussions there. Many of our contributors and maintainers are also friends, people we ping for advice on unrelated things, and so on, and sometimes discussions happen incidentally. We don't go out of our way to conduct discussions in private, and we make our primary communication mediums available to the public. Just because you don't like IRC doesn't make it less open. If you ask for more details, we will also often entertain your question, especially in the context of "I want to know so I can write a patch". But if you're just another grumpy user bringing their bat up for a swing at the dead horse, then no, we're not going to entertain you.

We're human beings, and we acknowledge that. I don't go out of my way to try and build a community which avoids that fact. Treat us like human beings, people with feelings and knowledge and a limited amount of time. You didn't pay for it, so you're not entitled to support, features, or yes, even explanations of why decisions were made. It's a collaborative effort, run by volunteers, who can stop volunteering whenever they want. Some users get burned by this, but contributors don't, and contributors are more important than users.

Sway is not some abstract concept of a project - it's made out of people.

I know this doesn't directly address many of your comments, but I feel that it hits on a deeper and more important difference in our beliefs. User entitlement is a huge problem in open source, and it burns out maintainers faster than anything else. I don't stand for it.

[Dayshine]

> Just because you don't like IRC doesn't make it less open

No, but having discussions somewhere completely unlinked to your open source repository without a searchable archive and no way to link to discussions does.

Hell, even gitter, which is a pretty clumsy tool lets you link directly to discussion, e.g. https://gitter.im/SublimeLSP/Lobby?at=5dce95d835889012b111a0... (although the fact that this project immediately moved to discord, a less open discussion tool without easy searching isn't amazing).

Do you prefer having to answer the same questions over and over in IRC rather than link to the discussion from a single authoritative issue?

For context: I'm 27 and in the last 10 years, I've used IRC maybe twice. To me, and many others, IRC is an opaque, closed, system. I have absolutely no idea how I would start to search your IRC channel. Hell, I thought IRC logs were only for conversations you were present for. If you can't just give somebody a link to a conversation (which you can in Slack, Gitter, Discord, Teams, mailing lists, Jira, bug trackers, etc) then I'm not sure it counts as open.

> so you're not entitled to support, features, or yes, even explanations of why decisions were made

I was initially going to respond by saying "then you shouldn't ask for contributions". However, the sway repo is actually much better than most and the CONTRIBUTING.md makes it pretty clear you should discuss things with the maintainers first.

Perhaps I'll update my projects with clearer guidance as to whether I'm interested in contributions...

[ddevault]

> No, but having discussions somewhere completely unlinked to your open source repository

https://github.com/swaywm/sway#sway

> Join the IRC channel (#sway on irc.freenode.net).

This is a clickable link.

>without a searchable archive and no way to link to discussions does

This misrepresents how IRC is supposed to work. You're not supposed to catch up on what you missed. You're supposed to have the conversation there. It's like chatting at the watercooler, not writing into stone.

If you're "searching" the logs as part of your normal IRC routine, you're using IRC incorrectly.

>> so you're not entitled to support, features, or yes, even explanations of why decisions were made

>I was initially going to respond by saying "then you shouldn't ask for contributions".

You're not entitled to it, but you might receive it anyway. And the only one of these which relates directly to contributions is explanations - withholding features and support, in fact, leads to more contributions. I have written about this on my blog on several occasions if you want to learn more about this approach.

[fluffything]

> If you're "searching" the logs as part of your normal IRC routine, you're using IRC incorrectly.

I fully agree, nobody wants to search IRC logs for technical information about a project.

If the only documentation about a technical decision in an open source project is an IRC discussion, then that project is just doing open source wrong. Those logs are at best hard to search for, and more often than not, non-existent.

When we have "online" meetings (IRC / Discord / Zulip / Matrix / Zoom / ...) to discuss technical issues in our open source projects, we always publish a full summary of the meetings so that everyone who wasn't there can read them and follow the rationale, or raise issues with it.

[fluffything]

> Just because you don't like IRC doesn't make it less open.

IRC isn't the problem, the problem is synchrnonous communication channels in general (IRC, whatsapp, telephone, Matrix, ....). If somebody is not available when the discussion is ongoing, they can't participate. That does make your communication channel much less open than, e.g., a mailing list, where somebody from a different timezone can read the discussion 8 hours later and participate in it.

> User entitlement is a huge problem in open source, and it burns out maintainers faster than anything else. I don't stand for it.

What burns maintainers is having too much to do, and the root cause of that is failing to grow other maintainers to help you with your projects, which is impossible to do if you act as a burned maintainer, because open source is something most people do on their free time for fun, and stressed / burned / overworked maintainers aren't fun to deal with.

Sustainable projects have a high-ratio of contributors relative to users. When this ratio is high, it doesn't matter that some users act entitled, because there are enough maintainers to deal with that load. If you have a lot of users, but a relatively small contributor base, that's when things become problematic.

Attracting contributors is probably the hardest part of open source, and like it or not, every project is competing against all other projects for contributors. Projects that are super nice to every user that interacts with them, no matter how "wrong"/"entitled" the user is, or tired its maintainers are, attract the most contributors, because people like working there.

Being tired while dealing with an entitled user and trying to be super nice with them is super tough, but all other alternatives I know are much worse.