[a_cool_username]

I partially maintain a GitHub project with ~1500 stars, many of my users are not very technically skilled. I rarely encounter entitled/mean/crazy people - we probably average one obnoxious contributor a year, two or three if you count the ones who go away when you politely tell them it's not going to happen. I get a lot of PRs and reasonably well-written issues from users whose profiles indicate it's their first contribution.

I think a lot of this has to do with the effort you put into community management. We put tons of energy into making it easy to make good contributions: PR/issue templates, we're on slack, we respond to emails, we make it as easy as possible to get your code in as long as it passes tests. It's a lot of effort and I can't imagine doing it for something that was just a personal project, but I think that's how the bigger projects deal with it.

[franciscop]

Totally agree. I have 100+ repositories open sourced (Just launched this website yesterday! https://statux.dev/), a handful of them with 1k+ stars, and for the most part it's just me maintaining those.

This is besides my fulltime job, friends and hobbies. So I don't really have much time for growing a community, I've done some effort in the past when I had more time and it worked fairly well, but I found it to be very project-oriented in general so if you do many smaller projects (as opposed to few large ones) the community approach doesn't scale well.

I don't encounter many mean/crazy people! I can count them with one hand. I find few entitled people, but most people I've found are nice.