What worked at 100 users broke at 5,000

With all the drama lately, I had many moments where I thought this can’t be good for your health. It isn’t good for mine, that’s why I didn’t engage in the threads and focused on more positive things. Most of Threadiverse development and conversation is way more positive, but the drama can paint it in a different light if you’re deep in it. PieFed has brought so much joy to so many of us and continues to do so. Thank you for all your work. I hope you can find some peace in all this.

Please remember that for every hater, there are 100 enthusiastic supporters, and for every criticism, 100 people that use the platform quietly but avidly.

You’ve built something great. Something I love to use, like a great many people. And if we are quiet about our fondness for piefed, it’s not because of lack of enthusiasm.

I think this is a good move.

A few months ago you and Piefed were widely, almost universally seen as helpful and neutral. I think your proposed change will move your and Piefed’s reputation back toward that.

As always, make sure you are taking care of yourself first.

Theres a LOT of people talking about “dark patterns” that dont read the code. Its frustrating.

I like what piefed does. I dont like the discourse and FUD over things that dont exist. Its a FREE service thats also open source…seriously.

I feel like people are used to complaining to multi-billion dollar agencies in order to get things working. Instead of opening up the code and diving in. And then fixing or forking the issue out.

I have another popular git project and there are people (the main creators of Laravel in this case) that think the library should not exist. But its still being downloaded in the millions. Once a project is big enough, theres always some supposive controversy just because it exists.

So in a way, congrats @rimu@piefed.social ! You made it!

Props for trying a new approach, good luck!

That being said, I hope you continue to engage with the community at least on the development side.

The “leftists” (emphasis on the quotes) on Threadi are full of shit. They are mostly edgelords or demagogues who don’t have any beliefs, it’s an online roleplay/aesthetic thing for them.

I am not just talking about personal conflicts. I am from Ukraine and its ironic to see alleged leftists support the genocidal imperialist policies of an authoritarian plutocracy (this isn’t limited to tankies, DB0 enables such narratives as well) using comical “but BATO expansion!!!” type arguements.

Thanks for your service, and take care of yourself!

Hello,

am silent piefed enjoyer and very happy. Idk and idc about any recent drama. Thank you for all your work!

First off, thank you for creating an excellent system, it’s been much appreciated. I’ve been one of those users with a feature request, and I was struck by both how fast and cheerfully you addressed it, but also by how much of a toll that level of responsiveness must have taken on you.

Well done for realising you need to step back a bit before it broke you completely, not all manage that. From experience, putting in proper channels for feature requests, issue reports, and even general communications, can make a huge difference to the stress of managing a big project, and give you a lot more control over how much you’re dealing with, rather than trying to drink from the firehose that the internet can be. I hope it works for you, and you can go on enjoying working on it.

As you step back from the front line a bit, could you allow others to help in both dealing with public interactions and even the development? I’ve noticed that Piefed seems to be a one-man project, and that shows through in some places. Bringing in a few more people might help ease the load, bring new perspectives, and even avoid some of the more contentious issues that have come up.

Make an alt of course. And don’t engage with goofballs. It’ll save you a lot of grief.

Frankly, I’ve been low-key worried about this.

I was a user for almost 2yrs on Lemm.ee, and noticed first-hand how the founder and head admin Sunaurus gradually got dragged in to the muck by this stuff. It almost seemed like the more he strove to inject professionalism and structure in to the project, the more toxic users the project seemed to attract, and the more of an overall drain it became. Something like that, anyway. All this was also hard on the other supporting admins, and I believe they too got burned out over time, fading away. Well, I was sad and angry seeing how that went, and fairly devastated when the plug finally got pulled.

Me, I come from long experience modding (and a bit of admining) webforums, and have seen this kind of thing there, too. The showrunner really does need to build insulation and practice good, healthy web-habits to survive over time. Then again, it’s undoubtedly trickier when one is also the dev of a custom project. Here’s wishing you the best, mate. <3

Btw, it’s coming up on a year that my project has been hosted here, and I’d like to make a Paypal donation representative of that time-frame. (I’ll have to look in to a monthly donation at a later time, as I have some decisions to make, there) I’ve looked at the three donation services but am unsure which would be the simplest to use for a one-timer. Ko-fi, I’m guessing?

EDIT: there are currently 2 downvotes upon this message. That is so funny.

Although unpleasant for me personally this growth is a good problem for PieFed to have.

Take care. You’ve been doing a phenomenal job. Full stop. Guess your own wellbeing is first and foremost important to yourself… But I guess we all also like to see you prevail, not become burnt-out, so you can continue to deliver lots of nice features to us in the future. Bit selfish, I guess, but that’s my perspective. And I tend to agree with your leadership decisions. It’s probably never easy in large(r) groups of people. But I think you’ve lead the project into all sorts of right directions. And I’d love to see us continue that way. If we somehow can manage to pull it off. It’s been the right way from early on.

(Plus: We can listen to haters and adapt… But we can never let the hate itself win.)

Please take care of yourself first. Piefed isn’t going anywhere, you could take a week or two away and delegate the sysadmin duties of Piefed.social to wjs.

You’ve done a great job building this whole software from the ground up. You definitely deserve a bit of time off.

Congratulations, Rimu! And to PieFed!

An amazing milestone. Kudos to the developers and the volunteers who made this all possible.

In a world experiencing such disruption and rising inflation, people reaching out to form community and share information have become more important than ever before. I hope to see these “third” spaces protected, and that these spaces prosper.

Seems like a healthy and natural progression of someone who’s built something that’s become popular and needs to focus. Nice!

Good luck, and stay in good health!

Good move. An unfortunate reality when your project grows too big you gotta step back slightly and be a little ninja in hiding

I’m not sure if you are referring to some particular situations but I totally get the feeling

Maybe it’s time to rework the issues pipeline.

No more chats, no more zulip, no more GitHub issues

A piefed community for feature requests and one for issues, with a bot chained to linear or similar and mods to help you without being devs or learning git etc

Single source of truth, on your own platform :o

P.S. and deep focus timeblocks or communication timeblocks