This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , @SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml , or @phiresky@lemmy.ml about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
We’re no different from 99% of open source projects: there are a lot of one-off contributors that just do a feature or two they’d like to have, but the vast majority of work is done by a handful of core devs. This is why you should always base your infrastructure and decisions to support those devs, rather than cater to one-off contributors.
I hope those wants and needs aren’t mutually exclusive. I think most open source projects do a good job in catering for both. I’m not involved in Lemmy development so I don’t really know what’s going on here. But I’ve sent one-off contribution to various projects, sometimes contributed single features or helped to sort something out. It always felt appreciated.
Sure, a drive-by commit every now and then and no responsibility is a completely different level than maintaining a (large) project and putting in that effort and dedication. I think a healthy open source project has both. Maintenance and the responsibility/decisions by a core team. And the community contributions make up by adding diversity, being close to what the user needs and adding manpower by a larger group of people, meaning the individual contributions might be smaller, but by many more people. Good communication between the devs and the community usually helps to get quality contributions.