Best advice is to not do something under your personal name but a shadow corporation like the rest of them. Ever tried getting support from Google? Or getting a human on the phone at Apple?
The project maintainer needs to reinvent themselves as an anonymous avatar and release software/hardware as Acme Corp. P.Midi or somebody.
When you find out, let the Nobel committee know. This kind of thing is not limited to open source - it generalises across all of society and is collapsing it as we speak. Somehow we keep giving power to annoying trolls instead of taking it away.
It is the commercial Internet. Basically quantity instead of quality. People should realize they cannot give everything away and accept to communicate with everybody. They should stop using big platforms like Github that optimizes for numbers. The communication should have some gates in the place. Not for the sake of gatekeeping but for filtering non-intellectual communication.
I think you might be surprised by how little shame humans can have... I've been amazed at the abuse people will post even with a real name and real photo avatar of themselves, yet some of the best online communities I've been on have been pseudonymous and just well moderated...
They are also dangerous, because the same shared reputation that allows a "good person" to hunt down a misbehaving "bad person" also allows the reverse, if the "bad people" are effectively outnumbered.
("All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing" - the effective number of "good people" is often zero)
Oh trust me, I'm aware how horrible people can be. But it still makes some difference, and more than a pessimist might think.
... and even more, if it were universally applied, the lack of opportunities for toxic ideas to fester in anonymous fora would reduce the incidence of them crossing over towards reality.
There’s an argument to be made that if you’re not prepared to deal with all of that, don’t become popular - either online or in meatspace, because it will happen.
It's a reasonable argument that, if you don't want to deal with some of the inevitable consequences of popularity, basically don't put yourself out in public at all. It's rarely an actual requirement for a lot of things. You can make videos for yourself without posting on YouTube for example (as most people who historically made hobby videos did).
>People should be able to produce and publish content without being harassed.
I don't disagree. (Assuming the content isn't of a nature that deserves a lot of criticism though that's in the eye of the beholder and is a matter of degree of course.)
But there's also the real world where putting yourself out in public can have consequences, especially if you become particularly popular. You take the good with the bad and decide if the tradeoff is worth it.
Not to make this political but you don't think there's a lot of content being thrown around at the moment that warrants criticism? Generally speaking I'd draw the line at outright personal harassment although I suppose that's again in the eye of the beholder.
1. Be a gruff asshole who just doesn’t engage with the community or give a shit what they say or want or think
2. Don’t publish your code, or publish it anonymously and never interact with users
3. Luck into having your project be in such a niche that the only users are likeminded people who aren’t assholes
None of these are amazing, but otherwise you’re basically guaranteed to run into this eventually.