Tech Over Tea - Code Is Easy, People Are Hard | Cassidy James

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

Whilst it might be kind of a challenge to solve certain software problems the real challenge is dealing with people not only people like you within your project but people from different cultures, with different goals from all around the world. =========Guest Links========== Website: https://cassidyjames.com/ Blog: https://cassidyjames.com/blog/ Elementary OS: https://elementary.io/ Endless OS: https://www.endlessos.org/ ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson. This is episode probably like 211. By the time you guys are seeing this, it's the middle of March. I've got a lot of backlogged episodes. Right now, for me, I think you're Friday, yeah? Yeah, it's Friday. Yeah, so it's the 16th of February for you.

So if we talk about specific things and you're like, why are they talking about something that happened a month ago? That's going to be why. Anyway, I'm Brodie Robinson. Today we have Cassidy James-Blade back on the show. How's it going? Welcome to the show. It's going well. Thanks for having me. Thanks for inviting me back. Yeah, I had a lot of fun last time. I thought it was a great episode.

You had a lot of great things to say. And I often, I guess we should talk about what the topic is today. Communication. So you told me about a talk that Alan Day did last year. I thought it was a really good talk after I saw it. I already wanted to do this beforehand anyway, but seeing that talk sort of set in stone that, yeah, we all know the way that we should be communicating,

the way that we can hold better conversations. The issue is actually implementing that and just properly dealing with people. This is what I was saying beforehand. Dealing with software, that's kind of the easy problem. People are the really hard part, especially across different cultures and languages and different communities

and all of these different things. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, Alan's talk is really good. And for context, if people haven't watched it i'm sure there'll be links or whatever but um the gist is like it's alan day as a designer he's employed by red hat he works on gnome um he does a lot of really good design work within gnome and he's kind of the de facto i would say leader of the design team there's not official titles or whatever but um he's been around for quite a while and so And so he's done a lot of like mentorship on the design team.

And he also served on the GNOME board of directors just a few years ago, I think. And so he's been around and he's seen these interactions. He's seen, you know, conflicts. He's seen things be resolved. He's seen big changes on the GNOME desktop and how both the community and people internally have reacted to that. And so he shared a lot of his kind of experience from all of that and saying, you know, here's how we can do better. Here's how we can resolve conflicts within the community. Here's how we can communicate better within the

community. And he lays out a handful of things to keep in mind, which is, it's really good. I recommend everybody, whether you work in open source or just are a fan of using open source, I recommend everybody watches it it's really good absolutely i think the only problem is finding it because you know it's i don't know if they've clipped out that bit because we talked about this last time yeah we did yeah we did but i stand by what i said i'm i'm still right uh and i know that there was another talk that did start doing it maybe maybe it was quite it wasn't quite like this like i know no because what what hasn't happened again yet hasn't it what no yeah it's in it's in july uh maybe maybe

had individual recordings up which is nice but yeah they weren't doing it already um i i'm taking credit for that yeah yeah there you go uh well what's funny with guadec is you know it's in it's in july here in denver where i'm based and, I'm on the local organizing committee for it. And so I've actually just had a few calls with like AV teams who are going to do the streaming and recording. And that's one of our things that we set out from the beginning. We're like, we are going to have individually uploaded videos, whether it's, you know, streamed on the day of, or at least just like soon after uploaded individually. Cause yeah, it's hard to link to like a timestamp of like four hours into the middle of

the day. So I actually, I feel a little bad after our last chat, I actually started going through and chopping up a lot of the videos from Gwadek and I got like halfway or three quarters of the way done. And I, and then like I got COVID and like just didn't have the time to do, to do the rest.

So like they're, they're chopped up sitting on my server. They just need to be uploaded. So maybe I can make that happen before this video goes live and then we can link directly to it. That'd be nice. Well, the one thing I do, we'll get into the actual point, but the one issue I had to have with the timestamps

is I noticed they don't work in embeds. So if I share, I shared this on Mastodon and it just started from the beginning. But if you go to the link. So people are like, what? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, are like, what? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

It's a pain. Yep, for sure. So I don't know where to start because there is a lot that we can talk about. Because I've got my set of things to talk about. You've got yours. If you want to go with yours first, we can just like direct around from there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So I think there's it's interesting talking about communication in, you know, free and open source projects. There's like there's multiple aspects to it. There's there's communication within your project, which in some ways is easier because communities develop and they kind of naturally grow into certain norms. And so when you're within your project, you're kind of in the in-group, right? Like there still absolutely can be conflict and there still is, you know, and probably every project, but like, that's actually not the hardest part in my opinion. And that's, so like Alan's talk talks a lot about that internal communication.

And that's, I'd say that the most important thing that I found from from that talk and just from you know my experience has been like face-to-face communication if at all possible whether that's in person or even like this video calls like that's that can be so so powerful both again internal with your project like if you can get people on a video call if people are comfortable with it and have the bandwidth for it or Or if you can meet up occasionally, even if it's once a year, once every couple of years. Those experiences stick with you and they help reveal the humans behind the work, right? And so like internally, that's a huge thing.

Externally, I think it's cool too. Like if you're collaborating with another open source project or you want to chat to somebody or maybe it's a newer contributor, if you can find a way, if language and technology lets you do it, that face-to-face communication can be really powerful. That's one of the best takeaways I think I had from that, from Alan's talk specifically.

But yeah, even... I was going to say, I think what makes internal communication a lot easier is at least in a project you will have a fundamental agreement on some core concepts like in gnome for example nobody's gonna argue we shouldn't use gtk or we shouldn't is like the mainly built like c or c plus plus i'm actually not sure what is what built in c or c like you know i mean a lot of languages but yes i would say c is the de facto like like language for gnome but yeah no one's gonna argue like oh we should use like this instead like rewrite it all in yeah rewrite i mean although you do get some people you do you get that right sure okay but yeah

good example no one's gonna argue like it shouldn't be built in GTK. Right, right. You have these like fundamental understandings. When someone is coming from outside of a project or you're talking with someone, it's kind of hard to, especially if they're not laid out clearly, make those points understood.

And oftentimes someone will get involved in a project and maybe not agree with those fundamentals and when that's the case that's when you start to see some of this i guess um pushback maybe yeah yeah yeah there's i feel like we talked about this last time too but there's this like especially if you're if you're a newer contributor you come in and you have like some wild ideas you're like man nobody's thought of this like i just i'm just the right person to have the right idea like they need to rewrite it all in whatever or they need to redesign everything and do this like it's easy to from an external perspective have those ideas like

but oftentimes like i said that the problem isn't necessarily the actual technical thing. It's the people interactions, the community interactions, or the stakeholders. Honestly, a lot of times you don't see the stakeholders that are involved in an open source project. So a good example is GNOME. Obviously, you think, I feel like it's a meme at this point that like, oh, GDK is Red Hat, is Fedora, is, you know, it's all the same people or whatever. It's Flatpak. IBM is in there somewhere. Yeah, sure.

Yeah. IBM is pulling all the puppet strings from the top. Right. And like, that's not at all how it works. It's really cool that Red Hat employs a lot of people to work on, you know, Fedora and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GDK and GNOME and Flatpak and stuff. But they're not the ones pulling the strings. They are independent projects for a reason. There are stakeholders from companies like Purism and Endless OS, and I'm sure there's half a dozen others that I can't think of off the top of my head. I mean, Ubuntu. Those are all stakeholders who have a vested interest in the project of gnome and like it's also interesting to think like gnome doesn't ship a product really

like and this is kind of changing with like gnome has an ecosystem there's apps there's there's a set of technologies but like there's not i mean there's a gnome os thing which is it's like mostly for development but gnome gnome is not the product itself that most users actually get, they get Ubuntu, or they get Fedora, or they get Red Hat, or they get whatever. And so you don't see the behind the scenes stakeholders to say, like Ubuntu says, Oh, actually, we're going to do this. And so we want we want it to work this way. And then endless OS says, Well, we want it to work this way. And we've done research that says this. And so you end up with this end product.

And so people go like, oh, the GNOME designers just did this and they didn't ask anybody. It's like, no, actually for like years behind the scenes, there were discussions and there were different stakeholder meetings and there was user research. And yeah, sometimes the thing that gets shipped is not like the perfect vision that the design team had or doesn't solve everybody's need perfectly. But it's because it is this collaboration between all these different stakeholders.

And I think that's part of open source and like Linux in general that people don't really see often enough. So that's something to keep in mind, I guess, if you're like, if you're commenting on a design decision or you're wondering why something happened a certain way in your favorite open source project. Like there might be these stakeholders that are, they're funding the work. They're the ones who are paying developers to do the work and they're not like secretly controlling the project, but they're obviously they're going to work on what makes sense for them. So yeah, it's just something interesting to keep in mind, I think.

I think you touched on something very important there. This, like these conversations are happening publicly like for the most part without obviously there are some cases where you're like guadec having a beer or something and that's a bit different sure no one's recording that hopefully um yeah but most of the conversation is going to be on like a public irc public matrix depending on the project it's going to be on a public mailing list the issue is accessibility of that information it's really really difficult to go through six months of mailing list to work out like a good example that i often like to talk about i obviously being like i like to talk about wayland a lot um like there's a lot of decisions

that happen in that project where there is like a 300 comment thread going over like all of these different stakeholders that have different reasons for wanting to do something not wanting to do something and what users often see maybe they'll see a pharonix article and it'll be like one little excerpt but you don't see all of that prior context you don't get the context exactly yes and i i feel like a lot of projects are really bad at communicating why something is being done yeah they're very good at communicating what's being done but the why is really difficult yeah this this is um yeah one of the points i wanted to mention is like, my recommendation for projects for their external communication, whether it's again, to their users, to other projects, to press even, like blog, blog about everything. And like, a poorly written blog, or like, even just like a good with words or whatever, write your blog posts.

But like blogging gives you this, like, it lets you summarize all those big conversations. Like you don't have to say, oh, just link to the pull request where there's, you know, 500 comments. You can say, okay, here's the thing that happened. Here's, here are the arguments for and against or whatever. Here's why it ended up how it is. And that just like gives you a canonical place to link people to, to kind of, to say, here's our, here's why it ended up how it is and that just like gives you a canonical place to link people to to to kind of to say here's our here's here's the stance here's the thing like that's that's something i was really proud of um that we did a lot with elementary is like we did these

monthly blog posts because we actually got feedback from the community that was like people when especially we're like really heads down working on a new release they'd be like oh elementary is not very active they don't do anything and it's like no we're just like we're like really heads down working on a new release they'd be like oh elementary is not very active they don't do anything and it's like no we're just like we're working our butts off but we're we're working like it's hard just to like talk about it out loud so we we made a point to do these monthly blog posts uh and i think that helps a lot i think it's similar to something that gnome is doing now with like these weekly this week in gnome um this week.gnome.org which is really cool um but yeah those like as much as you can sort of put it out there and just say like here's the thing here's either the new

feature or here's the decision or here's the new project or here's why we switched to this project or whatever it is putting it out like as a blog post that can be linked to is super powerful i think that's super helpful that's at you i don't know if you realize like what you there's like a really good point you made there but a lot of people have this percept this weird perception of a project and it's not just in the open source space this is the case in like game development like if you see like a uh game on indiegogo or something if a project is silently working people assume that nothing is getting done. But even if you're doing less work,

but blogging every single day, people have a completely different perception. Like, oh, it's improving really quick. Like you could have by the end, like six months later, dead silence, a great product, but less progress, but blogging every day, people are going to have this different perception along the way.

Yeah. Yeah. And obviously you can overdo it, right? Like you day, people are going to have this different perception along the way. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously you can, you can overdo it, right? Like you can, you'd be like, oh, we're just like talking about nonsense or whatever. Like you want to make sure you're actually talking about real, real things that are happening. Um, and not just future looking promises, whatever, but, but yeah, especially when there's like a decision that's made, um, or a change that's, that's being made or even like something that I think Tobias from from gnome one of the designers on gnome does pretty well is like he'll put these blog posts

out that aren't they're not announcing a new thing that's like here's the new thing but it's like hey here's a problem we're looking at right now here's my wild out there idea of how we could solve it and part of the reason for those blog posts is like to get people excited and get people thinking about it both again internally and externally and then that you know starts the gears turning but it also it also helps that you know maybe in five years or whatever if there's like this radical new window management this is like the specific thing i'm thinking about there's multiple examples yeah there's some new radical new tiling thing or whatever that gnome ships like it's not going to just like come out of left field out of nowhere it's like no no you can see that we've been talking about this for a long time like we had a blog post in like 2017 or something where we first

started like literally sketching it out on a whiteboard and then in 2021 or whatever, 2022, we had this blog post. So it helps in that sense, too, of not just announcing things that are new and out there, but also discussing the process a bit and discussing, kind of giving a peek behind the curtain a little bit. So much of what we do in open source, I think, is weird. It's out there. It's public. It's on public issue trackersers which is good and bad for different things for different kinds of conversations or whatever but also there's so much information

that it's hard to like follow a concise timeline or a concise idea through from from the initial thought to the final execution so again yeah i say like blog about everything that's just i think that's that's a huge huge benefit um and benefit. Just another anecdote from this is on the Flatpak side, or FlatHub specifically. FlatHub didn't have a blog until a couple months ago, I think. And so announcements were posted onto a discourse category that was an announcements category, which is fine. That's better than nothing but it was just kind of like there wasn't a good cadence there wasn't a real like a normal update schedule even when it was like hey here's our yearly state of the union sort of a thing it just wasn't super visible and so um something that the flat hub admins did recently which is

really awesome is they set up like a documentation site that also includes a blog um and that's that's awesome like now we have a place where you just like throw a little either little short little announcements or even you know long form longer form content um you know when we announced we were going to be at fosdm we put it on the blog like that helps so much like not having that meant that people just didn't have any visibility into what flat hub was doing now that it's there it's it gives us a place to put that information to say here's what we're working on here's the challenges we're seeing here's what's coming next i want to give a lot of props to both system 76 with cosmic on this and also the gimp project because they do gimp gimp's especially good example because you know there's the whole meme about gimp three is never gonna happen they keep the i think the date... The date's supposed to be Q1?

We're getting close to the end of that, so I don't think that's going to happen. I think they're supposed to be in, like, 299 or something right now. I'm sure they'll get it done eventually, but it's taking a while. But even though it's taking a while, they've brought these blog posts out.

They've brought these, like, yearly reviews out and indicated indicated like, this is what we're doing. This is what's still left to do. Here's the current state of the GTK three port. Here's all of these different things. And then in a Cosmic's case, they do,

I want to say their monthly update. Yeah. Monthly updates where they're like, Hey, we implemented wallpaper selection. Like it's nothing that exciting. It's just like, here it is.

But you can see the progress. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Or it's like, here it is but you can see the progress yeah exactly exactly or it's like here's like i don't know we have tiling in this way like all of these basic things just giving you an idea because all that stuff as you said is there on the issue tracker but it's just hard to find it's it's not it's not easily accessible that's that's the problem yeah yeah yeah making making your projects um information easily accessible is hugely important i mean that's both information about what you're working on or if you make a new release like having a good write-up of all of the new features in a way that's written that like somebody can easily digest and it's funny with both elementary and gnomeOME and other projects I've worked on and contributed to, one of the things you do with release notes or a release blog is you kind of look

at everything that's in the release and it's a grab bag. There's so much, especially with something as huge as GNOME. There's so many people working on so many different pieces yeah and so you actually you look at what actually has been done and then you kind of reverse engineer a story so it's like it it's funny because it's then when you actually share that story it sounds very put together and very intentional from the start and like a lot of times it's not but you you are you're taking that and making it easily digestible into a story. So a lot of times I say pick three main topics that you can kind of bucket all of the changes and improvements into. And of course you can always say, and more, and then include some other stuff.

But if you had a bunch of different projects that all worked on specific things that improve security, then you can say, okay, security was a focus of this release and here's all the things about security. If you want to say user customization, maybe there's a bunch of this release. And here's all the things about security. If you want to say like user customization, like maybe there's a bunch of different things that have to do with user preferences or user customization. Then you can say, you can bubble that up to the top and say like,

that's the other, you know, the second main point. So you kind of like distill all this chaos and it is chaotic, but you distill all that chaos into some common themes and then you repeat them and you, you like, you list them at the top you

repeat them again and again and again and the nice side effect of that is like that's also the like perception both of like end users and press when they cover your topic or your your project and your release like they'll hit those main topics and that's that's nice because as a project it lets you uh kind of dictate the the i don't want to say like dictate the coverage exactly because you're like obviously a press should do their job and like i guess check this stuff but like it lets you kind of story set the story yeah like tell the story and set the there's a word that i can't think of but um um lets you start the conversation sure yeah yeah and uh yeah and i think that's super powerful and that's something that like too many projects don't do they'll say like here's a massive list

of all the changes and it's just like yep it had a lot of changes cool and it's like too much to to comprehend but if you can kind of group them together in in a way and it helps a lot i don't want to take away from there is value there for technical release notes absolutely if you can kind of group them together in a way and it helps a lot i don't want to take away from that there is value there for technical release notes absolutely if you want to know for sure specifically what was changed and for some users that actually is incredibly valuable but yeah i i do think for especially for those who are not super like you know most people are not doing what i'm doing where i'm sitting there reading hours of main lists and issue trackers like most people don't have a super technical understanding of what's going on it's like oh i use gnome i like i don't know i don't know you like the the the

application overview thing whatever like there's just and it's like oh something changed like oh we've changed the way that applications are being sorted or they're being indexed in a different way to make them load quicker things like that like yeah you don't need to know the exact algorithm that's being used right that's all going that's that i can link off to that that's great but yeah you need to like take a step back and make it a little bit more high level i think that's especially when especially when it's like that a huge release like right like like an os version release or a gnome version release like sure like if you have like your release notes for your specific component or whatever like yeah you can get technical in

those like that's that the people reading that are going to care more about the technical stuff but like if it's like a a big version update like you can't you can't get into the weeds too much on that announcement of course again link off to the like the whole big list of all the changes or whatever but like you need to you need to craft a story around it you need to like summarize it pick some main topics and and kind of work that into a story um a great example of not doing this is are you aware that in gnu grep f grep is deprecated i know it's been deprecated for 16 years i well i i yeah i i couldn't tell you no one knows yeah that's the problem because they've had discussions the mailing list they've talked about like deprecating it they've gone from like deprecated to like the next level of

deprecated and then like they've shifted around but nobody knew i did a video on this i thought it was so funny but nobody was aware that it's deprecated they keep using it in scripts like there are scripts on your distro right now that are probably using e-g's both egrep and fgrep they want to swap it to you only use can do uh grep dash e grep dash f instead um but yeah things like that yeah yeah it's like if you if you've made a big especially like a breaking change or or a deprecation or something that's like going to change how people use your your project yeah for sure it's like you need to you need to make that a little bit more out there and like obvious. Yeah, you can't just rely on like error messages or whatever, you know? Yeah, that's funny. Yeah.

Another point I wanted to share too is like, thinking about this kind of, you know, this blogging and working with press, whether that's, you know, YouTubers or tech press or Linux press or whatever, or big press, whatever. You, like as an open source project, if at all possible, like put together a press kit. That's, it can just be whatever your high quality or vector logos, like high quality screenshots or screen recordings, like anything you would want put in a blog post or an article about your project or your release, put that in a zip file or some sort of a like press kit. What,

what I like to do, I've seen, I think flat hub does this and the elementary does this still too, is like, they have it on a get hub repo and there's like, get hub has the download project as a zip. And so you can just link to that direct zip link. And then if you update your screenshots or whatever, the time somebody clicks that link they'll get the right thing

but like make it press kit yeah no this is so we i think like two days ago it was merged uh we linked to it on the page now because it it was there and nobody including me knew about it because every time i talk about flat hub someone's like really use the old logo use the wrong logo like yeah yeah okay where's the right i know like usually now i just go to the website i get the um what do you call the favicon and just make it bigger because at least that's the right icon especially if it's like an svg it's like it's scalable it's fine yeah yeah no so we had this press kit for flat hub and like, it was actually when we announced the one over a million active users, 1.6 billion downloads, like all that crazy stuff. There was a blog post that used like the old logo. And then they like messaged me on Mastodon and they're like, hey, by the way, where can I find a high quality version of the logo?

And I was like, that's a great question. I have no idea. And I started looking into it and it's like we had a repo on GitHubithub that's like here's the press kit here's all the logos here's some other assets but it wasn't linked to from the flat hub website so we added it it's on the about page now let's see does gnome i think i think i saw that pr merged anyway there's at least an open pr but i think it was merged if gnome has one i can't find that either uh yeah there's brand.gnome.org which has some things but i don't yeah again i don't know i don't know how well that's linked yeah it's it seems like whatever seo they have for it isn't doing super well with the search engine

though uh yeah probably yeah maybe we need to put more information like press kit logos gnome branding yeah i don't know seo whatsoever all i know is if i search for gnome press kit logos gnome branding i don't know seo whatsoever all i know is if i search for gnome press kit it doesn't show up so yeah that's funny i don't know if you can um hear the noise outside my uh roommates uh nephews here so you hear a toddler screaming that's why no worries i haven't heard it yet also if you hear a toddler screaming here i have a four-year-old so so you know i think they maybe went to go get groceries or something i think they left but with with my wife not just the four-year-old yeah the four-year-old's just out roaming the town it's fine uh um so yeah okay so it says uh graphics and so uh flat hub.org slash about

then there's a section there it says press information and graphics and logos can be found here and it links to the, yeah, that was, that was merged within the last couple of days. So, because we just had a, an instance of that, I'm like, Oh, whoops, there's not good, uh, not good information here. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah.

That's, that's a, that's definitely like a suggestion I have for any project that was like, if you, you know, even, even if it's not much, even if it's just your logo, even if it's just like your logo and maybe a couple screenshots of your latest release, whatever it is. But if you can make it easily digestible by somebody who's going to make a YouTube video about it or somebody who's writing a blog post or a news article or whatever, that's just going to help your communication with the outside world to have a consistent voice have a consistent image um which i think can be nice yeah um you i don't know did we talk about this when we were actually live or before that uh you talked about being able to have like face-to-face discussions i was already recording when we started that um text is text is a really interesting one because it's really useful and you can have very technical discussions with it.

But the issue is oftentimes it ends up leading, especially if you're not being super clear. And sometimes it's hard to be super clear. It can lead to people misinterpreting what you're saying. A hundred percent. Especially if you're not being completely positive about a project you want something changed yes yeah depending on how you phrase it different people may interpret that in different ways like if you are being if you're being very straight to the point this is a thing that a lot of people in

australia do like we'll be very straight to the point absolute no nonsense about it some people find that yeah exactly some people find that really rude yeah yeah this is this is great point i had i had like a couple of notes about this uh yeah text again it's like it's really nice in a lot of ways because especially if you if it's different cultures different languages like it lets you do it asynchronously. I mean, of course, you can have like real time chat, but like if you're doing, you know, social media or Reddit or whatever, like text is really powerful in that way because it gives you time to like think process, translate or whatever, rephrase things. But yeah, it can lead like you i think as somebody who reads text your default is to just assume everybody has the same frame of reference as you yeah and so that's you think like ah if

somebody in my culture the way i talk said this i would get offended because you know they didn't sugarcoat it or whatever whereas like if you're talking to somebody and it's like no our culture is like we we just don't sugarcoat we're straight to the point we're you know they didn't sugarcoat it or whatever whereas like if you're talking to somebody and it's like no our culture is like we we just don't sugarcoat we're straight to the point we're you know brutally honest or whatever and like that could be that could create a clash when you don't you don't really see i mean as silly as it is it's like you hear somebody with a different accent than your own and like that in your brain that tells you something right that says oh there's there may be a cultural difference here even if we're speaking the same language there may be a cultural difference here. Even if we should be in the same language, there may be a cultural difference. Or you're talking to someone who doesn't look like you, you're talking to somebody who it just, I think that

in-person thing just communicates so much more information about the other person and like facial expressions and everything. Like, like when you inflection, it just, all of that stuff that you, you don't get in text, I think can put a lot more meaning. And of course, you can still have misunderstandings in person, like that still happens. But I think the, I think the, they're a lot less common when you, we can talk in person. I have a fun example, I think I always talk about is my first Guadec that I went to. I talked about this last time we were on too, but there was was there was somebody who like it was pretty i don't want to say blunt i don't know if that's the right word but just like to the point

in in our communications uh online i only ever talked online and like so some people in the community didn't really like them or whatever and then like met them in person and i was like oh this is like one of the friendliest nicest people i've ever met like genuinely nicest people ever and so that like it's just a totally different thing when you're just like some rando on a blog or on a um an issue report versus talking face to face i think what the way that i would like to see people approach things is just if you're going to have a conversation like this assume the person you're talking to has the best intentions like there is obviously there also comes a point where someone is clearly being a bad actor like they are not trying to have a good conversation here they are trying to roll you up look i'm at fault for that sometimes i'm not going

to say that i'm never at fault for that. But if you go into these conversations with the best intentions, assuming the person is trying to make progress here, I think this is especially true in a project where it's like a meta project, like Wayland, where you don't have one set of goals. You have all of these different individuals from all of these different desktops that have all of their own separate design guidelines and UX experiences they want, where you'll often see there's clashes about super basic things.

My favorite example right now is whether an application window should be able to set its icon and the children window should be able to set different icons from the parent and this is such a basic thing but it's led to so much discussion and i noticed that when uh when fosdum happened matthias uh the guy who's uh matthias clump the guy who's uh like started the the issue he was like yeah so we actually resolved like a bunch of these issues by just talking yeah yeah it's amazing how that happens right like and that's why i think the the in-person conferences and meetups are so powerful um it's like people are energized when they go to them they're excited to like do something new and

interesting they're excited to see people face to face um they get in a room they realize that we're all on the same team we're all friendly um you know it's a combination of both doing like work and doing social and going out and getting a beer or whatever it's like it's this really productive environment where you can just say you know what okay yeah actually like we might disagree about this thing but like we agree that this is dumb to like hold up this project like let's just let's just work on what we can together um that's i like to say that a lot like Even when you have projects that are competing in open source, you have co-opertition is what I love to call it. You're cooperating together when it makes sense, and you're competing on what you think is the best vision for a thing. And that's, I think,

when open source is the most healthy is when you are working together as much as you can. you are working together as much as you can um when you're you're even when you have differences of opinions or differences of vision um work work together on the things that overlap like even if you're not literally using the same code like you a lot of times are solving the same problems um like there's so many random examples but like uh elementary and gnome is a good example of this of like elementary is a downstream of gnome a lot of gnome technologies but doesn't use like gnome shell you know it uses gdk but doesn't use eduada and so there's there's overlap in approaches to things uh even if it's not the same code like gnome shell learns from uh gala and gala learns from gnome shell and like I think that's really healthy.

You can say, hey, when we were solving this from a design perspective, here's why we did it this way. And that might inform the other project and that might make it better. They might have something interesting that informs how you do yours. And so I think that collaborating, even when you're not shipping the same thing, even when you're not saying we're going to write the same code base and both contribute to the same code base, it still is super, super valuable to talk

and to learn from each other. Yeah, absolutely. I think where communication tends to break down, obviously there's a lot of other points, but the point where I think most people should probably agree it's just off the table is when you start bringing in personal insults like that's yeah yeah that just is net there is never a time where insulting

someone's like okay maybe there's a time we're insulting someone's code works but insulting insulting like you know i don't know the state of their project other things going on in the project whether they should even be involved like all of these things just they do not help in any situation if that's the route you're going like you have to you have to be prepared to just like end the conversation or like if if your goal is just to remove someone from a project like like sure, whatever. But you're not going to have a productive discussion after this point. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's, I think it's hard because it's a lot of times it's hard to understand

and realize like what is personal. Right. I think a lot of people, especially in open source, especially when it's your like passion project, your pet project, like you feel very personally like it's it's if somebody says that your code is bad it is easy as a person who wrote the code to say they are saying i am bad right or if somebody says that you know your design i you know this design is ugly or i don't like it or whatever it's really easy to take that personally yeah and so it's that's i think the flip side of it is like yeah obviously you can't like personal attacks are dumb like don't don't i mean attacks

are dumb in general but like but like person you don't talk about the person themselves like bring up someone's family focused on things like that yeah or like yeah it's like keep it focused on the the product and i mean when you it's hard because again like if you're talking about the governance of a project it's like that's not necessarily personal but it could be an interpersonal conflict or something like you might refer to someone in leadership yeah yeah so it's hard to kind of draw the line I think but but yeah I would say generally like yeah if you're going to critique something if you're going to talk about something if you're going to talk about something, if you're going to criticize something, keeping it focused on the objective product itself, I think is important. And then on the flip side, as somebody who, if you're receiving critique or receiving criticism

or receiving commentary, just anything, try to not take it too personally too. This person who's critiquing and criticizing is sharing their experience of why they don't like this person this person who's critiquing and criticizing it is is sharing their experience of like why they don't like this thing they're not saying you are if they're saying you are bad and you should feel bad then whatever but like generally they're not like usually they're not um yeah yeah this is a problem that i'm sure it occurs for in like open source as well, people tie up a lot of personal... Personal self-worth. That's what I'm trying to say. They tie up a lot of self-worth

in the work they are doing. This happens with YouTubers especially. They'll make some great video or video they think is great and it gets... On YouTube, YouTube has this great mental health edition where it shows you the ranking

of each of your videos one to ten in the last 10 videos and you upload a video you wake up and it's like 10 out of 10 worst video of the period oh no yeah that doesn't seem like the best you can which is nice but that is good but yeah sometimes you do have to like you have to disconnect a little bit from like okay you know i did this thing thing and I did it and I like it and I think it's good and it solves my needs or whatever, but people didn't like it. And that's, it shouldn't be personal, but it's really hard to not make it personal when that's, when you have so much self, you know, like self-worth or self, just interest in

it. Yeah, it can be hard and it can be hard. And I think, again, on the if you're providing criticism or critique, I think that's something to remember, too, is like, even if you're just critiquing or criticizing the, the thing, like, you know, the product, like, even if you keep it just focused on the product, like it will be taken personally to an extent and that's you know you can't you can't necessarily avoid that and um yeah yeah i think that's i think that's important to remember from both sides from the side of being critical this is something i've i've certainly experienced

firsthand people will provide something that they feel is constructive criticism and that's great please go ahead and do so but the issue is when someone feels like they're giving constructive criticism and then you don't feel that that is useful criticism or you don't think like maybe it's maybe it's well argued it's well like it everything about it is wellentioned but say for example like uh gnome like if you give a completely well reasoned argument why like a system tray is a good idea and why upstream should have a system tray it's absolutely great there's not like any fault in the logic there just because the project doesn't think that that is a good idea doesn't mean the project is against constructive criticism like they just might something i've started saying recently is even if you give constructive

criticism that doesn't mean it has to be accepted you might be trying to construct something different that's a good point yeah yeah i like that yeah that's that's something especially thinking from the known perspective like there's this i, like, there's this, I don't know, there's this, I don't want to say meme, I don't know, mentality, I guess, of like, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's fair to say that GNOME has, like, a, they have a design vision, and that's the vision they are aiming towards, like, their goal isn't to be, like, you know, you configure every little aspect of the desktop there's obviously a lot of configuration you can do but it's not like you're gonna control everything they've got this this vision they want to aim towards and that's where they are going and that's they think that's

a good idea and that's great well i want to see someone do that because it seems like it's going well for them where did i just saw i think it was on on mastodon there was an interesting discussion now i'm trying to think of what who it was is it nate from kde is that a it's that nate graham yeah is the blog but it was but there was a just a post on mastodon that was really interesting talking about like kind of the difference between kde and gnome and it was from somebody who works on KDE and contributes to KDE. And it was like, I thought it was a really good perspective of, you know, KDE does it this way and we often will not say no. We'll often be like, yeah, sure. Your weird use case. Yeah, great. We'll support that. And that means that it can be really adaptable to whoever,

you can build your own experience out of it, which really cool and i think there's value to that existing and then on the gnome side gnome designers and gnome contributors say no a lot more and people hear that before yeah it's like people hear that no and they're like oh they don't listen to feedback and it's like no that's not what that is they they listen to feedback and they just don't agree that's what they want to build. And that's okay. Like, that's how you build a cohesive, opinionated experience or project. And there's positives and negatives.

Like, yeah, that post, I'll try to find it after the fact and we maybe can link to it. But I thought it was a really, really good kind of comparison of just the different approaches and what, what effect that has. And it doesn't mean one is better or worse. It just is, they're just different. And I, you know, I am on the, uh, of the opinion that if I'm going to build a product, I want it to be opinionated and, and have a specific vision. And, um, so that, you know, I'm attracted to the gnome kind of philosophy because of that and but some people aren't and that's and that's fine um and maybe that's a case of like maybe as a project that's something that approach to things is something you need to make

more well communicated to and just say hey we accept you know we accept bug reports we accept feedback um but we do have a specific vision in mind and it's also not as like top down as some people think there isn't just like three designers who make all the decisions or whatever like there are three designers that are very vocal on on social media and that's why people have that perception yeah yeah sure but it's like like i was saying before with all the different stakeholders like there's you, these things can be years-long processes where we're talking to different projects. Even within GNOME itself, there's maintainers of specific components and there's the GTK developers. It's not just to the design team, I wish that was the case. But that's not how it actually works. But I do think, yeah, if you can communicate that as a project up front, like what your approach to design is,

what your approach to suggestions and feedback is, it doesn't mean you're not listening to those suggestions and feedback. All of that feedback does play into the design decisions that are made. But it doesn't mean that if you say i think this should be a feature that they're gonna be like yeah sure yeah no problem like that might be like but how's that gonna work with this other feature we're working on like yeah there's just a

whole there's a whole philosophy behind how a product is is uh designed so i'm sure you've heard things like you know i i hate this statement i i wish it would go away like linux is about choice like i like no linux is about freedom like stop it i i don't know i don't know at what point in the history of like the free software movement that it shifted from freedom being you know you're able to modify the code you have like you all the you know, you're able to modify the code. You have, like, all the, you know, four freedoms, all that, too. You have the freedom to do whatever you want with the application. Like, it's flipped upside down, where it's like somebody... Yeah.

The work has to be done, but the work's not getting done. It's like, if you want the freedom to modify things, someone needs to add that to the project. But if no one's adding it to the project, then obviously you don't have that ability to do it yeah i think the freedom goes both ways right like as a developer of an application you have the freedom to develop it how you want like and if people don't like it and don't agree they can they can fork it i mean that you know that can be an

abrasive way to say things like you know you can fork it or patches welcome or whatever but like but that really is part of the beauty of open source is like you can't just because it's open source doesn't mean you have to do everything for everybody like you can say as a project this is what i want like i i maintain a couple of just really dumb little apps on flat hub right and like i get people that come to me and they're like this is great but i wish it did this other thing too and i'm like i i'm just not i don't have time i'm not really interested that's not the that wasn't the problem i was trying to solve that doesn't mean like your idea is bad that just means i don't want to do it and that's like

you you the code is there it's open it's under a gpl license like you can take it and do it and adapt it and that's awesome and that's the power of open source and the freedom of open source is that you as a as an end user as somebody who gets the application and the thing like you can get the source code that made it and that's unique and powerful and and something you don't get on proprietary mainstream platforms like but that doesn't mean that you as a user of open source are entitled to every feature that you possibly want being implemented and maintained in perpetuity by somebody else so yeah i think it it can go both ways and and yeah it's hard and again it's a

communication thing too of like yeah that's what you're saying into yeah go ahead yeah i was gonna i was gonna say i look i don't i don't want to call out specific names, but we both know that there are people in the Gnome Project that do this. There are people that... There's definitely going to be... I don't have names off the top of my head, but there are people in the KDE Project that do this as well,

who are, like, very... How would I say it? Are not... How do I say this without specifically mentioning people not delicate no yeah yeah who are very yeah this goes back to what we're saying they're like straight to the point and like yeah i don't care that you think this is wrong like i don't care that this is the way that you you don't want yeah uh go just go use something else like you're we are not here to serve your like your specific you like the way they approach it just is like i don't know if it's intentionally inflammatory or it's just bad

at communicating through text or what because i'm sure these people are great in person but yeah yeah there are especially there are certain people who are like really they get harassed a lot for it because like you know people feel like they're they're you know uh criticism isn't being heard and this is what you're saying before like this is like a two-way thing like you need to like if you want people to understand what you're doing you need to explain the why and not just the what and people from outside the project need to be able to like understand what's going on there and i think ultimately the the ultimate thing here is just don't use projects that don't align with what you want to do and that will solve all your problems but right yeah you know that's not

always that easy yeah i would say i've definitely seen in again multiple projects at multiple companies whatever like there's a difference between being a good developer or good maintainer or whatever and being a good communicator and yes i i think those are if you have both of those skills that's amazing and you're a unicorn in some ways um but in the age of social media it's very easy if you are the maintainer of a project to go out there and say something and it to be maybe accurate but abrasive um and as an open source project this is something about gnome that people don't understand like gnome is not a company like gnome can't fire people i mean no so there's the gnome foundation which is an organization that has a handful of employees that like manage the legal side of things but like the people developing your

favorite gnome app or whatever feature are are generally not employed by the gnome foundation or or gnome itself you know as a company and so to be fair you could get banned from the git lab if you were abrasive enough right but it's it, okay, if they're saying things that are abrasive on social media, that's a bummer. And there's a code of conduct committee, and if they're actually violating the code of conduct. But a lot of times, being abrasive is not against the code of conduct. you know like being a jerk if it's not targeting individuals and and you know harassing people like being mean in itself is not strictly against the code of conduct if that makes sense which like and and and also there's so many social media platforms and so many people in the gnome that contribute to gnome that like you can't possibly like laser eye monitor everything that

everybody says on social media and you're like we wouldn't want to but it just means like sometimes you'll have somebody with a either whether it's an ego thing or just they just have an abrasive personality or i like to tell people like they're so tired like maintainers of open source doesn't matter who it is like maintainers are so tired and burnt out that like sometimes your bs threshold is just really low like like so you just will like call somebody out about something on social media and from the outside if you're like ah see gnome gnome people mean and it's like yeah okay yes we don't just have to bring up should that person have said that i'm sure the same thing is true with like linus like linus has oh yeah yeah thousands of people

that are trying to talk to him every single day and when he just likes when he has like an email it's like no this is wrong you're wrong you're stupid this is wrong stop it stop and stop it like i get it it makes sense yeah it's totally understandable why he just randomly like seemingly randomly just explodes on people in the main list. Right. Yeah. It's like, okay,

this, you know, there's, there's been other conversations. There's been other, like they've been doing this for a long time. They've they're tired, they're burnt out there,

whatever. And so it's, it's hard. You want it, you want to balance the like, okay, it's really powerful to have your contributors of open source projects be out there sharing what they're working on to social media.

That's great for your project, but also like rein it in sometimes i think like yeah maybe maybe it's not a good idea to be out there and and saying like i hate i hate people that comment to this on bug trackers it's like yeah okay i understand that that's that's your opinion and that that's how you feel but like people are gonna see that they're to see it out of context. They're going to, it's going to either, it's going to either like reinforce their existing idea of gnome, gnome people bad or whatever project is mean or whatever.

Even if you're not being like actually abusive or actually, you know, super inflammatory, it's just the more it's hard because the more visibility you have into the maintainers and how things work, like the less of a filter there is, and it can reinforce stereotypes and opinions, I think. But on the flip side, you can't really like control that. Now, if you're a company, you totally can. You can be like, hey, if you're posting about our product on social media, like you need to stick to the talking points or whatever and

in in open source you don't always get that and it's a it's a positive and a negative i think i don't know which social media platform was experimenting with it but i thought it was a really good idea where they'd use some like magical ai language model stuff and if the the post got flagged as like potentially controversial there'd be like a timer before it would get posted so like yeah i've seen this 20 seconds whatever and it's like if you have like it's it's really easy to post something you like read something really inflammatory it's like uh i don't know you know this specific gnome developer you're a bad person or whatever and you want to like fight back straight away and it's very easy to to write

something just post it but if there is that delay there if there is like you know if you take five minutes take a walk outside come back in you're like wait yeah do i actually like is there anything productive that's going to happen from trying to fight with this person on the internet? And the answer in almost every case is no. There are some cases, sure. But most of the time, if it's just some random, like, anonymous account, no, probably not. Yeah, that's the, like, the XKCD of, like, somebody on the internet is wrong or whatever. Like, yeah, it's like the xkcd of like somebody on the internet is wrong or whatever like uh yeah it's like you know what sometimes it is not worth your time and energy to to try and correct

everything like i and i get i get pulled into this too like i i do it too of like somebody will say something and it's it's wrong or they they are missing context and i'm like i really want to correct them um and it's hard, I really want to correct them. And it's hard. It's hard not to when you're like, no, maybe I can change their mind. 99% of the time, you're not going to change your mind. You're just going to tick them off, and you're going to create an argument out of something that was just a random post. You're going to raise the visibility of that argument, which is just going to reinforce people's existing opinions about something.

I think there are cases where people... It's hard. It's weird, right? Because there are people that are looking for a conversation and there are people looking to argue and yeah yeah because you can have some great conversations about whatever topic it happens to be and if someone is willing to come to the table and look at what you're saying and empathize with your position and where you're coming from you can actually like even through text i've had some great conversations before but identifying what that is especially through text versus someone who is specifically saying something to rile you up like oftentimes the difference between those two are very subtle yeah some some people sometimes people

just want to have an argument and like if you're gonna feed into that you're just burning your own energy um and you're probably not making yourself or your project look good like even if you're right like the fact that you're engaging in an argument in public on social media just looks bad yeah even if you're right even if you're like 100 right and i've had to tell people this too like there is oh man i don't i don't want to call out the specific project i'm trying to remember what it was there was an open source project um so i remember now but yeah it's something that i i i like and i've used and like i think technically the project is very interesting and they have a habit of like causing drama or causing uh just like refuting anything and like overblowing i can think of like 20 different projects which is why i'm trying to

make it generic to be like maybe you can think of an example like maybe you can think of an example of sometime this has happened in your own project or you know whatever whoever's listening to this but like the fact that they were engaging in these arguments even though i think technically they were correct but the fact that they were engaging these arguments made the project look bad to me and i was like oh i don't really i don't know like so that's that i think that's that's hard to remember of like it's like if you were going to go out on the street and you're going to like start shouting at somebody outside of the workplace right and like or if somebody came to your workplace and they're like shouting at you from the street that's like okay if you just ignore that they're

just the crazy person on the street shouting at the building right but if you come at if you come out of the building and you stand there in the street and you shout back at them yeah like you both just look like idiots like even if you're right even if that person is totally in the wrong and they're shouting at you and they're crazy and you are have every factual point and you can counterpoint everything that they're saying you still look like two people yelling at each other on the street and i think social media is the same way of like sometimes just getting in a public argument is not worth it like that's when you can take it you can take it privately you can say hey you know i saw this post of yours i thought that was interesting um you know if you wanted to discuss it or learn a little bit more like

i'm happy to to talk to you about it but like trying to like one up each other on social media or just like prove your your other on social media or just like prove your your right on social media publicly just i just don't think it ever looks good well what it does is it it tries to score points with the people who already agree with you like yeah yeah yeah you're like let's let's just say there's like an argument between like a gnome and kd developer the gnome dev is arguing for this curated experience. The KDE dev is arguing for customizability. Like, no one is going to come out of that and be like,

ah, hey, I was a supporter of GNOME. Oh, yeah, you know, I actually think that being able to customize is a good idea. Like, no, what's going to happen is the people who support GNOME, they're going to be like, yeah, GNOME's right. People who support KDE, they're like, yeah, KDE's right. I'm going to go on the outside, eat my popcorn and having fun laughing at both of you. And that's, I think, where most people are going to be.

Yeah, a lot of people are going to be like, wow, these open source projects, like, wow, they just like to argue a lot. I can't believe that they just yell at each other in public. Like, yeah, yeah, you're not doing yourself any favor there. Yeah, and it's hard because it's, it kind of goes back to the, like, the like and maintainers being tired like uh we've had this conversation in gnome before of like it has been extremely powerful that our our issue tracker is

really accessible to anybody like it it lowers the barrier for reporting an issue which is awesome when there's somebody who's going to come and report very critical of bugzilla i i am an avid disliker of bugzilla i love the fact that you know this is git lab yeah same i love it like i i remember back when i first started contributing to gnome and adjacent things like if somebody told me to like send a patch or even like report an issue it was like a whole thing it was a huge pain and platforms like gitlab make that way easier they lower the barrier they make them way more accessible but it has this kind of flip side of it also creates less of a barrier between like less of a barrier's not the right word but less of a buffer

i guess between the the people working on the project and just randos on the internet this argument i've heard about linux and the mailing list the mailing list is a good filter because you know you can make a gitlab account because you can sign into the gnome gitlab with your github account can't you i think so there's like the gnome has actually been fighting spam and stuff recently where like you don't have as many permissions if you don't actually have a gnome membership right so there's like there are interesting things that you can do but in general like being able to just report an issue is really powerful like that's nice to be able to report it the problem is when it's a mostly volunteer project,

every issue that is reported has to be addressed and the energy you have to address every individual issue diminishes with the more issues that are filed. With Linux and the mailing list, I've also heard that some of the workflow there is a huge pain and it is a real barrier to people to contribute who otherwise would contribute. And so it's hard. You have to kind of balance making it accessible and easy to actually onboard people in a way, but also not exposing your

maintainers and your developers to just every piece of criticism that any rando wants to just anonymously or semi-anonymous anonymously throw at them um that's hard and i don't i don't think i don't think anybody has a a perfect solution to it um i think something that like i like the direction of and i would be interested in gnome doing more of is that you know gnome has a process for for membership and like becoming a gnome member a member of the GNOME Foundation is a thing. And there's a threshold. You have to have done some sort of contribution to the project in the last couple years. And then every two years it has to be renewed. And it creates some sort of a baseline

to say, okay, if you have membership like you probably can comment on anything on on gitlab but if you don't have membership if you just registered your account today or or whatever like maybe you're well intentioned maybe it's you know maybe you're reporting a real issue but there's a lot more volume of like spam and just vitriol or whatever like you know just just garbage that can come through too this is a completely side tangent but have you been on mastodon today not much okay because i don't know what's going on i'm asking maybe you weren't involved in it but there was a concerted bot campaign to sign up to like a bunch of these like you know it has like these random

trash instances that are like just you know no no sign up nonsense it's just like anybody can sign up it's whatever and there was a bunch of spam accounts that were just linking to a discord server and i was getting like hundreds of notifications about it oh my gosh um they so people noticed the because it was the same message every time someone tried to the way someone tried to block it was blocking um the first line of it konnichiwa which is hello in japanese which is not the correct term to block it on please don't block out hello um anybody saying hello in japanese blocked yeah um they blocked it instead on the discord link and now they've swapped over to Korean text.

And with a different Discord link. So, yeah. Spam's a big problem in anything. Even that. Right, right. Yeah, and so, yeah, you can have positive and negative consequences of making things more accessible, right? Like, more accessible to people to read, to write. We, an analogy I like to make too is like,

you know, even if you're working on an open source project, like, yes, you work in the open. Yes, like the actual code is in the open. Yeah, it's great if the issue tracking and project management and stuff can be in the open as much as possible. But like, if you were working on an open source project as a company in an office you probably wouldn't have a 24-7 open door policy to

anybody who wants to walk into that office right right like there is value in having like walls and doors like uh having some sort of buffer between you and the outside world um doesn't mean that what you're doing is always in secret it doesn't mean that uh you know you're not sharing your work you're not just doing it you know over the wall code dump or whatever but like there is value in having some sort of buffer or threshold there where where you can communicate within your project you can have you know whatever spicier takes or whatever and like there are things that you would say in a real world physical office to your co-worker about an open source project that you would never say in on the internet publicly for everyone to read right um and so i think

that's that's another another solution you can have is like if you have a place where your contributors can come whether again in the gnome foundation or in the gnome project i think like foundation membership could be a a threshold there of like if you've gone through this you've demonstrated you're part of the community you're part of the the contributor base like you have access to this but it's not this public place where everything you say can be screenshotted and taken out of context and then used to harass you or whatever which has also happened so it's yeah it's it's hard because you you don't want to arbitrarily restrict what people can can see and do for your

open source project because that can restrict contributions and you know feedback but some sort of a buffer i think can be valuable yeah i think when it comes to at least pub i don't know how you deal with anything more than that like the general communication but at least for public issue tracking i'm not opposed to having at least like a time buffer like if you sign up with a new account you can't report anything for 30 minutes an hour whatever it is i know that that does create problems because then if someone's completely new then maybe they just want to go back to it yeah yeah that's hard right there's always like this is if you know okay given infinite resources and money or whatever like i would say every open source project should have like people who triage issues that are different

than the people who maintain the project yeah full-time triages they can do like that'd be hugely valuable though because like a lot of times like i'm happy to do that triage work on a project that i don't actually maintain like i'm happy to be like okay okay i see what they're saying or oh this is just a troll whatever just delete it or you know close it or this is a person who is repeating the same argument that somebody else made and i can combine the issues like doing that work is tiring but if you're if you're less invested in the project itself like like if it was on like i'm trying to think of some rant like like gtk itself like i don't contribute to gtk besides talking to the gtk people every once in a while and sharing my thoughts like i don't write any code for GDK, whatever. But like, so it would be easier for me as somebody who's kind of disconnected

from the development to go and triage issues. To go through and say, okay, I see what this person's reporting. I see okay, this is a duplicate thing. But if you're the one who's also invested in writing code and doing all that and is already overworked and tired and everything, then doing that triage is hard. And so you gonna be like you're gonna be a little bit more

short with people you're gonna just be more direct not as i don't say like political political isn't the right word but like you know less uh careful in your language maybe like uh so yeah it's it's this hard like given infinite money i think that would be that would be a really valuable thing is be like there just needs to be people who go through and just triage stuff and and kind of create that buffer between the maintainers and the actual like the fire hose of anybody being able to to say anything on any issue or pull request pull request is another thing it's like so often there will be a pull request where it's like there are people there that are doing work and it is as if they are in the office, like they're doing code review,

like they're sitting their desks next to each other, but it's just happens to be it's actually on a public GitLab instance. And then just some random person from the internet walks in and just like brigades the issue and they're like, this is bad. You should do it this way, whatever. And it's like, who are you? Like, why are you why are you here showing up in my office critiquing my work that like you're not a part of this but it's also super valuable to like have that stuff publicly so it's so hard

to manage and i don't know what the right answer is that especially is a concern that i have like so obviously when i talk about something you're going going to have, no matter what I say, I can say, don't do it. Don't go to this project. I can just not give a link to it. I can, I can like blackout names.

People are still going to find it. And it's this hard thing. I really like to talk about like issues. I really like to talk about merge requests, but yeah, it can be really interesting and really revealing to, to see the process. Right.

But especially when something isn't going well, like I'm sure I've been, I am very, very critical of the way that Weyland is handled. For example, I, I, I look, maybe people would disagree with me. I kind of wish the project started with a BDFL. I feel like it would have had a very different trajectory. I'm sure people involved in the project completely disagree with me about that. But there's just a lot of cases where I look at it from the outside

and I just don't know how people can't agree on basic things. And just super, super... Not even agreeing on the implementation, but just agreeing that there is a problem. Like that by itself is already bad enough for me um and when i do those when i do those negative videos no matter what i say there is going to be people that not maybe not negative is not the correct

term like critical maybe uh there's going to be people that go there and i don't know defend my honor do whatever whatever term you want to use like go there to start arguments themselves or anything else like that yeah yeah yeah it's like like i was saying it you know it's it's hard because it's it can be really valuable to to show the world or, or specific people, especially people who are interested in getting involved, like how, how the sausage is made or whatever.

But yeah, it's also like, man, if you're, if people are just going to like come and comment on a merge request out of nowhere or like, you know, a bike shed,

a decision. And it's like, who, okay. Like who, who are you? Like, why are you just showing up here specific people to do so before they have like specific requirements like um i have a blind game dev friend uh and he feels like the like wayland icon thing is like an accessibility

thing because he needs like the icons to be able to determine which windows are which sometimes because he he uses this system at like 1600 zoom like he had he can see it but it's like very very limited vision um yeah yeah so seeing just the wayland icon on every window makes it a bit harder to use the system than it like really should be yeah yeah yeah that's interesting i like that's that's an approach i like from the from the gnome side too is talking about like okay yeah gnome doesn't like customization and preferences or whatever but like when it comes to accessibility like you do have to approach it from that angle of like how if this is if this is actually solving a problem for somebody with some sort of limitations or like hardware that's different from yours or whatever like yeah yeah

i think it's important to think of things not just in the ideal well this is how i think it should work but in the like how how is this actually used by people yeah yeah yeah that's interesting and i feel like encouraging specific people like that to get involved is a i feel is fairly valuable but as like a general like me too issues like oh me too i have this issue oh i have this issue like no stop it like yeah if you have do the little thumbs up or whatever if there's if there's an option for it if you have like a additional bug i feel like additional logs can have value but if you're just saying i have this issue as well like that by itself i don't i don't feel has any value maybe if it's like an issue that hasn't been there's been no conversation for like three years if there's some

way you can start a conversation together even like usually what happens then is the maintainer comes in to say well poor request uh merge request welcome whatever and it's like oh patch is welcome like yeah it's i i i get wanting to get involved like that that is totally understandable like you want to you want to push this to get better you want to push this to get fixed but if there's nothing productive to add to the conversation like oftentimes it's just it's just extra noise really yeah yeah yeah i think that's i think that's the important thing to think about if you're ever reporting reporting an issue or commenting on an issue or a merge request whatever is like does this actually provide new information that can be acted upon or is this just me sharing my opinion or my thoughts or whatever?

Like usually a merge request or even an issue report is not the right place to share your thoughts and opinions. Yeah. It's usually a place to share an issue that you're having or information that can help solve the issue. Like if it's like you're wrong and this is why you're wrong. It's like, that's not,

not usually the most productive way to approach it. Or yeah, I have this issue too and it's making me hate this project and whatever and it's like okay that's not that's not actually helping like yeah i do like that most of these like issue tracking platforms these days have like the thumbs up thumbs down reactions whatever um because it used to be you know i would anytime i'd link to an issue report anywhere i would be like i'd be like please don't just comment plus one or please don't just comment me too i've seen very old debian issue trackers where the entire issue the entire thing is just plus bump bump bump yeah that's a good the oldest form yeah it's like no but i so i really like that they have these like reactions

now because i can tell then it gives you an action which is this is hilarious this is also this is a technique that um people say to use with toddlers as well as don't tell them what not to do but tell them what they should do instead right but i mean that works with anybody right it's like don't just say like please don't comment me too on this issue but you can say hey if this affects you go ahead and give it a thumbs up please only comment if you have new information and like that that's that has been really helpful because that's it tells people like hey i'm not posting this link to have you go brigade this issue and derail the discussion whatever but that count of how many people thumbs it up can be one signal to say oh this actually is you know important to a lot of

people or affects a lot of people so So I think that's an interesting thing that I'm happy to see has become pretty standard on GitLab and GitHub have it. I'm sure other platforms do too. But I really like that there's a distinction between a really easy way to be like, yes, I'm affected by this versus just commenting and creating more noise.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. I guess I want to shift directions a bit to talk about yeah uh a lot of the conversation around especially really big projects that have been around for a really long time a lot of the conversation that happens around it ends up being i guess based on things that are just no longer true it's usually it oftentimes it's not people making things up but it's things that haven't been the case for a long time like my my favorite recent one is um gnome is gnome is fsf gnome is gnu which was true a very long time ago very long time ago yeah yeah there's these like there's these misconceptions or outdated

information that get just spread it's kind of saying this earlier it's like it's not quite a meme but all that's the best word i can think of for it of like it's this thing that people say and it gets repeated and it gets repeated and it gets repeated until like people just believe it because they hear it so much the waylon protocol is made for gnome that's yeah yeah it's like do you know who's all contributing and using this and do it like yeah yeah yeah that's a good one um or i mean this is whatever a little inflammatory maybe it's like gnome only removes features and like what i always like to do is be like okay let me take you to the release notes and show you all the features that were added there were no features removed actually but there

were these settings were added these settings were added. There were no features removed, actually. But there were, these settings were added, these settings were added, these settings were added, these settings were added. And that's been the case for five years, that the settings available in GNOME have actually expanded and increased over the last five years, more than they've ever been before.

And yet, people will still, I'll still say, I'll still hear people say, I don't use GNOME because they're just going to remove all these features and it's like have you actually been like paying attention um but there's always like some either some truth to it or it was the case at a time where like you know there was a time where a lot of things were being cut back and they were trying to like yeah it's solid like solidify the core right especially if you go from you know gnome 2 to gnome 3 like there's gnome 2 was like every setting was its own little app and like you know it was kind of you know you had the top bar and then you had the drop down and

like every little like you want to change your wallpaper that opens its own little dialogue or its own little app or whatever and so maybe the way you experienced gnome 2 was different because you were using it from a different distributor using it the ubuntu one which included other things or whatever and then yeah when there was a change to gnome 3 when they put everything all into one settings app it made it much easier to find settings and things but it also meant that yeah there weren't as many settings and features and options there and yet since that point until today i'm pretty sure it's only ever been like adding new things um but yeah there there's uh i don't know if i'd say there's truth to it there's a there is like a a seed of

information there that is that it's coming from somewhere it's not just made up it's coming from something it's kind of like a game of telephone right or like whatever i know people call it different things where like someone says one thing they whisper in the next person's ear whisper in the next person's ear and 10 people down the line you go from i don't know um uh red hat is involved in the gnome project and employs a lot of developers to red hat owns gnome ibm controls everything and pulls the strings like somehow along the way it just morphs into this completely different yeah yeah yeah and it's hard it's i've said this many times but nuance is hard on the internet and when you have that game of telephone the nuance is lost right yeah so like if there's this the seed of truth

uh it gets repeated enough times inaccurately enough times and over and over again. And then, of course, affected by people's different perceptions that, yeah, you end up with something that's like, what? This is not true and has never been true. An example on the elementary side when I was working with elementary is like people would call elementary os like a walled garden platform and it's like okay i think the seed of truth there is that very similar to know that like elementary has a vision for how things should work and the elementary app center to like to submit an app to the app center like it yes it has to follow certain guidelines because that's what elementary decided that they want and that's fine but it doesn't mean that like you as the end user don't have

control over it's not like using an apple device where like you can only get apps from a certain source or you can only run what they say you can run like yeah so the seed the seed of truth is that okay yes there's there's an opinion curated experience, but also you can add any Flatpak remote. Also, you can download and run whatever you want, like on your own computer. It's yours. Like, you can do what you want. And so I think that's, yeah, a lot of times you have, there is a seed of truth there, but you kind of, it gets reiterated and the meaning of it or the the actual like nuance gets lost well i think in some cases not necessarily a seed of truth i think in some cases it's just

people are not aware of the change like there's a lot of especially i'm going to keep going back to whaling because it's such a good example of this there are a lot of people that think random things that aren't broken anymore are still broken like video capture for example i hear often like oh you can't do video capture on whaling i'm literally recording this right now on whaling or there's no equivalent to redshift there's nothing equivalent to x render and yes this was true at a time and i think this goes this is looping back again a lot of projects are really bad at sometimes they're really bad at saying the why but sometimes they're also saying really bad they're really bad at saying the what as well just indicating that something actually is going on like in many cases these are things that have been fixed but because the discussion about it

being fixed or like it's some like random project on a github somewhere because the conversation hasn't been had and people are not aware of those solutions being in place people still think it's in the state it used to be in and no progress has been made and i get it because oftentimes these are very technical problems and they're not entirely clear what's going on and like it makes sense like not everyone has eight hours a day to read up on exactly the state of every project on their system i totally get it yeah but this once again going back to the bad actors, there are some people who, even if you tell them and you show them that this is not the case anymore, they will still say that, no, it is the case,

and no, you're wrong, because for some reason that doesn't make any sense. But when someone is acting in good faith, usually you can at least explain that across properly right you can at least say like well you know yeah okay this thing you said that that used to be true and it's not and here's here's why um yeah i think i have a a spicy take i don't know if it's spicy whatever uh that i uh something i've actually experienced though is that like lts lts distros contribute to this problem like they lts distros have a reason for existing and and whatever but like but i think it

is true that they contribute to this problem of people having outdated information because they're experiencing something that was released four years ago maybe right if you're like 1804 right now yeah it's like maybe if you're trying to use wayland on 1804 or whatever like whatever it is like maybe yeah you're having you have outdated information because you're literally running something from four years ago and that's again there's there's reasons these things exist there are reasons to run you know known stable whatever software but like you can't use that experience to say that objectively something is true or false because you're, you're very outdated. And so I see that with, um, yeah, with things like, oh, Wayland is buggy because it does this, or, or it'll be even be like

this specific project on this specific distro, the way it was integrated was buggy, or the very, the specific release they were using was buggy. And so it's hard to like, you'll go out and just like make these sweeping statements of, oh, this thing sucks, because it's broken. It's like, well, I mean, if it's broken on your distro, that was released four years ago, and you know, yeah, we fixed that four years ago. And it's kind of hard to keep repeating that same information but if there are a lot of people using that version like i get you know that's their experience with it so yeah it's hard it's hard to balance i think the biggest example of this the most like widespread example is the people who is any like the how to say it the the general hatred for Pulse Audio.

And the reason why it exists makes sense. Like, in 2006, 2007, it was buggy. When Fedora adopted it and Ubuntu adopted it, they didn't adopt it well. They had broken configs. It did genuinely break people's audio back then. Lennart literally came out and said... He described Pulse Audio as

the software that currently breaks your audio he was the guy involved in making it, he didn't think it should have been adopted when it was and that has just stuck with the project through all those there are people who were not using Pulse Audio

who were not using Linux, there are people who weren't alive back when that was the case who oh yeah you still have this perception that pulse audio was a buggy mess and when we started shifting away to pipewire it wasn't a buggy mess it's in a fairly good state we swapped for other reasons not because it was broken right but yeah yeah so you get these you get these like outdated perceptions or like you say you know there's that seed of truth there's that yeah that used to be the case but it hasn't been for a long time or yeah i can see how you you know got to that conclusion but that's not really accurate so it's it's hard um that kind

of touches on a point where i something i always try to do when I'm either like writing a social media post or like blog post. And like, you can go, you can go too far down this hole. But I like to think, think, think of everything you're communicating defensively. Not like get defensive in an argument. as an open source project. Preempt what you expect the critique to be or if you know there are misconceptions about something that you're writing about, preemptively address those in your blog post or your announcement.

Because, and you're never going to predict every single critique that every single person has, but a lot of times you can predict some of them or a lot of them or the most common ones. And I think some people want to, they have the approach of approach of like oh i just don't want to talk about that because they're wrong and so i'm not gonna give them whatever but it's like no if you know this is what most or what a lot of people are gonna share your article or your blog post and say like oh look they're doing this thing and it's bad because x y and z like if you know they're gonna say that like address it in the article because then then you if they do share that then it's like you obviously didn't read the

article um read the announcement or whatever it is i'm trying to give a specific example of this but this is something i try to do a lot of like it's like oh so a good example from something really recent um i wrote the blog post for flat hubs announcing the um you know over a million active users and anytime you talk about like metrics or telemetry and open source i mean we know this uh you get people who are like oh you're you know whatever you're you're my privacy and and i say that out of context that could be bad i am one of the most like i'm one of the most uh fanatical like privacy advocates that I know. I feel very strongly about privacy and individual privacy and not sharing personal data, not gathering up personal data.

And so, because we know that about our audience from the FlatHub perspective, we know people are going to be like, they're tracking everything we download. So, we preemptively say we don't rely on client side information. We're not sending any information from your computer to a server. We're not doing that. I think even though it should be obvious, or we think it should be obvious that it's like, of course we don't do that. But we know that that if people hear this, that says, oh, they're tracking how many users they have, they're going to, they're going to complain about this. So you

preempt some of that perception. You say, I no we're not doing it i'm gonna scare people if you connect to a web server and they they will probably log your ip in their system logs your ip will be there this is a thing that happens also if you run a linux distribution you, you trust whoever maintains that Linux distribution with 100% of everything that happens on your computer. I've got a video coming out about exactly this. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's like...

And now we're getting into an interesting area. So this is something, a conversation we've had about metrics and telemetry and things and like one of the arguments is well if you do telemetry or any sort of metrics now i have to trust you as the person who's making the distribution or whatever and it's like you already have to trust us like if i am you know distro foo whatever just making up a distro if i'm distro foo and you're running distro foo and i don't have any telemetry whatsoever that tells me how the product is used uh you still are trusting that like i'm not pushing out an update to your computer that then sends me all of your data or that i'm not changing the software

in ways that you don't know or that i'm not using root access to to access things on your private device like there's already a level of trust there i think and so it's just interesting that like yeah i think you do have to trust it i think a better way to look at that is not i have to trust you because yeah you are right there but just i don't want you to have that information like i can trust someone i can trust someone to like you know be around my family whatever but i don't necessarily want them to have a copy of my driver's license for example yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah and so yeah that's where like the argument there are other arguments that absolutely can and should be made and that's why things are designed the way they are but like the argument of if you do this we have to trust you

is i think it's interesting yeah no way off way off the the track of the original conversation but yeah it was we had a lot of interesting conversations that followed them i'll put it that way it was it was it was a enlightening uh discussion um i definitely want to talk about the handling communication with videos and blogs because this is kind of the reason why I wanted to do this in the first place because I got a lot of criticism for the way that I did my video

on the FlatHub guidelines. I stand by a lot of the points you brought up a lot of people don't like the reason I brought up some of those points, but I stand by the points I brought up I understand that the way that I brought up some of those points, but I stand by the points I brought up. I understand that the way that I brought them up, though, probably wasn't... I feel like they might...

Let's go back to what I was saying. I like to put in humor in my videos, and this is especially true of different cultures and political values. One of the things in Alan's... I'm jumping all over the place apologies here hopefully you can follow along what i'm saying in alan's talk one of the things he brought up is using humor and i think you should be cautious about that because there are a lot of different cultures out there who like there there are certain cultures that simply don't understand sarcasm like sarcasm is

just not a concept and if you try to do that like they'll often people oftentimes people who don't have experiences in other cultures they'll take what you're saying at face value like completely literally yeah exactly yeah it's a funny anecdote about this is like my wife, her family. I don't know. I don't think they will watch this. Her whole family is very sarcastic. And growing up, my family is not very sarcastic. And when we started dating, that was something that like I tripped up on so many times is like, especially my mother in law.

Now, she would like say something. I'd be like what she's like my and then my wife my girlfriend at the time katie would be like she's she's being sarcastic like she would have to like interpret for me and like i've gotten much better at picking up on it but like that's a very real like even people who are close to you there's miscommunications on on how you approach humor and and inflection and tones and stuff. So yeah, it's hard. I think the point from my recalling Alan's talk is like, you know, it is okay for it to be a lighthearted environment, you know, and things are generally going to be better, come off better if you kind of build that

rapport by having a lighthearted environment. And like, not everything has to be so serious, especially when you're in an open source project where people are spending their free time like people don't want to go people don't always want to go and be like be 100 serious in their their hobby project right like people want to have fun and so yeah it's hard because humor can definitely differ between cultures and people um but i think having that trying to keep it lighthearted is definitely something worth worth your time. Yeah. You bring up that as a, but yeah, that's like the, the, the flat hub stuff is interesting

because it's, you know, if, if people are, you know, okay, you're, you're talking about some specific screenshot on docs or whatever. Like you're, you're really hounding on it because it's kind of funny. And it's also like, this is stupid. And like, you're entertained by that. But then people are like, wow, I can't believe they were so offended by that thing. And it's like, this is stupid and like you're entertained by that but then people are like wow i can't believe they were so offended by that thing and it's like well okay yeah you have to see it from their perspective like it's kind of this funny thing or you were trying to make it

you know you're being what's the word they're like like you can be hyperbolic right like and that's that can be a way to have to be lighthearted and be humorous is to be hyperbolic but like if you take it out of context or you don't quite if you don't catch that that's what's happening you could be really offended to be like wow i can't believe that they were so so upset by that and yeah i definitely yeah who were like oh well you wouldn't care if it was this political leaning or that political like or like no that's not what i'm saying that's yeah like my my general general point i was trying to get there is i don't feel like it's the place for official documentation to be including like potentially controversial figures like that's my yeah exactly

yeah i could have said that and that would have made the point clearly i'm sure people would still be like oh this person's not controversial blah blah you're right you could disagree yeah yeah but but that was my entire point there i don't think like especially because the the official image was just like some generic i don't know if it was a person in the project or if it was like an ai face or something it was just some random woman i think her name was like it was like the generic um the name they use for like i think it was angel avery yeah it was like jane smith or something like that yeah yeah so yeah yeah yeah yeah and it's it's one of those yeah like and i think that's both sides that are a good point about communication of like yeah are are is official

documentation a good place to put in like kind of a meme troll whatever thing like problem probably not that's probably not the right place like i find it really funny because like it's pretty funny i'm like it's it's funny that it got people talking and then like it's this meme that keeps coming up now like people saw that faz them like somebody put like the communist manifesto like on the gnome booth like it wasn't a gnome person who did it but like somebody was trolling us like they put it on the booth and then took a picture and there's like oh some interesting stuff from gn but it's like i find that hilarious because it's just like it's just this meme right but if it's out of context or whatever like yeah you could be like okay you're gonna go on a little little little far there yeah um yeah so it's like yeah as a as

a project you should preemptively understand how people are going to interpret something you've funny meme joke whatever to you like some people are going to interpret something if funny meme joke whatever to you like some people are going to take it way too seriously um and then also if you're if you're looking at or or um you know if you come across that in a project where it's like oh that's weird like it might just be a goofy joke like it's probably not as serious as you think it is like yeah sometimes people who get really bored making mock-ups all day every day put little memes and jokes in their in their mock-ups and that's like absolutely understandable um i noticed this i like to do april fool's videos and because i'm in australia they always go up the

day before which makes it funnier oh yeah um so every i think last year i did a video i don't know how any like it was it was so on the nose this is what i mean by there are some cultures that have zero concept of sarcasm i think there are some cultures that have zero concept of humor um because i made a video it was the most ridiculous video possible i basically said that i'm actually not an arch linux user i just have a highly customized version it wasn't ubuntu it was like a meme version of ubuntu called ubuntu um which is like an anime meme version of it and i was like no i i've actually just modified all of these different files i've modified my neo it looked like art yeah to make it oh i i'm just like i have a wrapper around pac-man around app to make it look like pac-man and it took some people like eight

minutes into the video like there's another year i pretend like no i'm actually like secretly a windows user and it's like yeah no yeah it's people like even if you think it's the funniest thing like there's always gonna be people who misinterpret or just don't get the joke and like yeah obviously you can't like make everything super clear to everybody all the time. Like people are going to misunderstand things. Those videos are intentionally unclear. I just want to see how long it takes

some people to catch up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh man, we had a, this reminds me, at Fosdum at the Gnome booth, we had an idea for some April Fool's joke and I don't remember what it was now. Dang it, I didn't write it down. Yeah, I have a love-hate relationship with april fools because it's like because of that exact

reason right of like people some people get really offended that you wasted their time like you made them think something and you got them and it's like all right like i think if it's light-hearted enough and like or obvious enough you know okay if you if you got them for a minute and then they read to the end and it says happy april 1st or whatever like i think that could be fine but but yeah it's also like maybe maybe uh something that you think is really obvious and funny is not going to come off that way to other people yeah so um when you mentioned projects being light-hearted are you aware of the really cursed windows 11 linkedin hotkey like what control alt shift l or whatever it is yeah super yeah windows l so in kde when that sort of popped off someone made a an issue yeah

okay you are aware of it um for anyone who isn't somebody a issue or a merge request on the kde project and was like for windows one-to-one compatibility we need to replicate this hotkey and then people started suggesting other hotkeys that should be added as well it's like oh should we have one for like yeah have one for like the the kwin documentation all those other random things yeah should we only support foss platforms things like that yeah yeah i think like that stuff can be fun as long as it's you know it doesn't go i guess too far or whatever like but yeah if that's it is hard it's a hard balance right it's like if somebody came in and was like thought you were actually discussing this they'd probably be like what the

heck but i think it's you know if you if you can have some fun in your issue tracker and have some fun in your conversations and it's you know harmless fun and it's just that's that's gonna make your community i think more more healthy on the internally right like you're healthy if people have fun when they come to contribute and people have fun or they they don't take have to take everything so seriously um yeah i think that i think that can be a positive for sure um that's why i love you know that's the positive side of like following a lot of open source people on, on social media is like on the one side, like, okay, social media can be stressful and whatever, but it also, it can also let you get to know people better. And, you know, I love when people post about not the project that I follow them for, because

that just like, if they get super nerdy about some other thing or like just are talking about their family life or their whatever,, their biking or their hiking or their like whatever their thing is. To me, that makes it more of a genuine connection. It makes it more lighthearted. And I enjoy that. I enjoy that it doesn't all have to be like super technical on point about the project itself. Yeah, I follow Ariadne Occonnell on mastodon and the other day i i just i opened the website and there was this giant thread talking about utes like uh do you

know what a ute is yeah yeah okay cool for anyone who doesn't know um it's like a sedan with a flat bed it's like australian car trend at least it was when we had a car industry and just this giant thread about like building a ute and like what what is the definite specific definition of a ute it's like i don't know why you were talking about this but sure okay this is fun why not that's awesome yeah yeah that's so funny uh yeah it's just like it it provides uh insight and humor and just like again i think it's similar to that like in-person aspect of like when you when you meet these people you meet the real person not just the like official voice of whatever and yeah so i think i think in a lot of ways social media can be powerful in that

way um it's hard it's it's so hit or miss though because like there's a lot of ups and downs with yeah with being so public or or so uh exposed to everything uh about your project or or every bit of criticism um it's hard it's also hard the other way like i i've known a lot of open source contributors that like they're like ah i'm gonna block i'm gonna block people very uh they have a very low barrier to being like i'm gonna click block right and on the one hand it's like yeah absolutely like if that's better for your mental health just to like block that that noise out and then but i've also seen from the other side is people get really offended when they get blocked by you know contributor to to whatever project here and they're like ah you know i can't believe they blocked me i didn't even say anything bad and it's like well you know that's their right like they don't have to listen to you

like even if even if you never said anything objectively bad or whatever like you you got to manage it both ways like i think you have to remember that these people are the open source contributors in general are generally very overworked very tired very burnt out and they are exposed especially in our modern social media world they're exposed to so much noise that they might be using the block feature just to block out noise that they're not interested in and like it's not personal at all and so it's easy to get offended like it's easy to be like i can't believe they don't listen to me and it plays into the oh they don't listen to users or whatever that if you want to go that way but like it's also like they're right to listen to the voices

they want to and not listen to the ones they don't i guess so yeah it's hard yeah if you like think about it in like real world context if you're having conversation with someone and then you're just like i'm not involved i want to be involved in this anymore and you walk away like that's pretty much what it is and sure i guess people are like they get offended by that like oh you know why are you like why you do this but like you know i i don't want to associate with like the the crackhead that's on the street so like i'm i'm gonna block you yeah yeah it's like you're just not interested in that conversation now and you just you don't yeah yeah yeah i think different people have different like um what's the word different understandings of what they're

or just different like reasons for for using the block or different understanding what a block means like a block if you think of it only in a like oh if you block someone it's because you absolutely hate everything about them it's like no obviously that's you're gonna get offended but like some people just are like i'm just here to listen to the some people are like i'm on social media to only hear about this one specific topic and so you block everyone that doesn't talk about that topic. And that's like, they can use it that way. That's fine.

That's hard. Cause then you, if you do, you can, as a user or as, as somebody who's, you know, wanting to engage with an open source project,

you can get, you can feel like you're not being listened to, but you know, there are also other avenues to share feedback besides some personal person's social media account like um yeah well last thing i want to touch on and we're gonna try to navigate this subject in a sensible way i waited to the end for a specific reason here um i want to talk about this general trend of these YouTube hit pieces. And I know that there is a lot of history,

especially... There's less history with one of them, but they've both been around for a very long time. A lot of people who developed opinions for a long time. And I don't want to focus on the specific individuals and their specific circumstances. But as like a general sense, if you feel like someone has over the years been like a detriment to your community, to the general space and all of that do you like what are your general thoughts on like just not just blocking them out but actively going after them because i think those are two different things right if you don't

want to associate with someone totally you're right absolutely don't associate with anyone you don't want to associate with but actively basically doing to them what you're accusing of them they are doing like that that's basically the point of getting out there yeah i think i think this is hard because it's i i don't know what i don't i don't know what i believe no i don't know what the right answer is necessarily um because there's i think in general if there is somebody who is um you know abusive or or dangerous like in not i'm not even saying just an open source but like in in general like de-platforming i think works like that i think we've we've seen examples of that where there is somebody who's riling people up for a specific thing that

is dangerous or inciting violence or whatever and if you just like exclude them you don't engage you don't promote anything you don't talk about them you don't even say their name like in that way i think de-platforming and just like shutting them out ignoring them whatever i think that is probably the most effective thing you can do without getting super into politics. Like I think that's, that's something I get upset when I see like news, like articles that just like constantly are talking about some polarizing person.

And it's like you're just feeding, you're feeding the beast at that point. You're giving them the attention they want. You're talking about them. You're giving them the attention. And a lot of times people that, a lot of times people who are out there riling people up, whatever, they're seeking attention.

So I think the most effective thing you can do is just not give that attention um so if if you as a community have had bad experiences with somebody or have um you know don't don't believe somebody's doing good whatever like i think that i think the most effective thing you can do is just disengage then there's that next step of like we use it like a hit piece or like a a p you know a video or an article or something that is specifically going in and saying like, here's this bad thing. Here's what they did. X, Y, and Z. I mean, I'm thinking of, you know, there's a, I think I know what you're referencing as far as some recent videos that came out, but I'm also thinking of like there are other, other things that came out in the past.

You can think of like political people as well. Like, you know, news outlets love when there was a controversial figure because they their ratings just shoot through the roof because they you know the people who hate the person will watch the people who love the person will watch it everybody is like let's let's let's get engaged in the drama yeah and so my i think my instinct is to say like, no, that's bad. Don't, don't feed the beast. Don't fuel it. Don't, you don't need to go, you know, and, and talk about this thing in, in, in depth and in detail. Then I see the flip side too, of like, maybe it's if it, if there's been a certain amount of time or if there's been a certain amount of, I don't know, if it's something

that you're like, this is really dangerous or really bad and not enough people know that that's the case, I can see the value in like from an informational, you know, sharing information to say like this, this is what this person has done and this is why people are upset with them. Like it, on the one hand, I don't like that you're giving that person more attention if, if they're, if you think they're bad or whatever. But on the other hand i think it can be beneficial to to share that information to give the context to say this is this is the history of the interactions with this person um but i do think it is a fine line i think there's a fine line between sharing information i guess almost three different things

like sharing information and also just like giving attention and also like being a hit more of a hit piece or being more of like an, a negative angle around it. So yeah, it's hard. It's hard. I don't know. I think anytime I see something like this,

I, I feel, I don't know what the right answer is. There's I'm trying to think of something as, yeah, not as recent that, you know, if there's conflict between two open source projects or something and it's

like, and somebody writes a blog post that says working with project X is, is terrible and here's why. And they, and it might be all accurate and factual and correct. And they, they might think that they're doing the right thing by saying, I want to expose this to the world.

But is that actually solving anything like is that where like is it actually benefiting anybody to to go out and do this piece that's documenting here's all the negative things that have happened or whatever i don't know it's hard because then it you as the person who's writing this or making this video, you feel that you're obligated to inform people about this thing that's happening. So, yeah, it's hard. I think there's a couple of things to touch on there. You mentioned deplatforming working. And I disagree in a sense. Because especially with the way the communication is done in the foss world

like if you say oh this person is you know i don't want to interact with them on macedon like you can't get rid of someone on macedon like there are exceptions like you know what happened with gab where there was a concerted effort for the entire Fediverse to block out this instance. But in most cases, it's not as clear. And even if you... It's basically just more like a concerted effort to not interact with them in that case, because they can't really be removed. And also, you're seeing this development

of these alternative platforms as well, where even if they're no longer on the mainstream ones, they can still have a fairly large audience on rumble bit shoe whatever whatever other platform they happen to be on yeah yeah um so i i wouldn't necessarily agree that it works it definitely does slow down the potential growth but i i don't think it's it silences them in the same way. Right, yeah. I mean, I think people, especially people who have a following

or people who like to rile people up or whatever, they're always going to find a place, an audience. They're always going to go somewhere. What I think in the case of deplatforming, you are not obligated to give them a place to share. Sure, yeah. I don't think you should interact with anyone you don't want to interact with. Absolutely. Yeah yeah and that's when you can use blocking gratuitously if

you're like i i'm just not going to engage with this at all like i'm going to block them whatever and i think that's i think it's valuable um i think as an open source project if you've had um you know a particularly uh negative interaction with a specific person like i think it is perfectly fine to say yep they especially if like they violated the code person like i think it is perfectly fine to say yep they especially if like they violated the code of conduct or whatever it is yeah like as a consequence it's like yeah if they if they show up in the forum like they're going to be blocked and banned like that's fine like one thing i will say about code of conduct sorry i've gotten you off but i think it's important with code of conduct stuff if someone could be banned from a forum for code

of conduct violation what i really hate is not telling them specifically what they did. Like when it's just like, Oh, you broke this rule. And they're like, I didn't break this rule. What did I say? What did I do?

Like by not telling them, you're giving them that, that, that free reign basically to say, I didn't do anything wrong. I think it's important to make sure that they know what they did and the other people like so then other people can also know like okay this is what the because sometimes rules are especially when they're like no harassment whatever like there's

like a line there where is it harassment is it being critical it like is it personal is it not at least going back to what we're saying like where's that line between critic like personal and not personal and harassment and not harassment and some people yeah making it clear you're making it clear like why yeah why something is being enforced i think yeah yeah it's definitely important um it also like it also can you know like i was saying like preempting things too. By being very clear of this was what you posted, or this is the interaction that happened, and so this is the consequence. It makes it so they can't just be like,

oh, I'm just being oppressed because of whatever. And it's like, no, you can disagree with the decision. That's fine. You can disagree with the code of conduct. That's fine. But this is our community with our code of conduct. This the rule this is the thing that happened this is the consequence yeah i think that's i think that is important i think it's i think it's also hard if you are dealing with like a lot of like yeah as a moderator of a forum or something it's hard to be like i'm

gonna give tons of context for this thing um but yeah it is it is like i've seen instances in the past where you know somebody was banned from from a forum and it turns out it was actually a misunderstanding or miscommunication. They're like, oh, I didn't know that the thing that I said could be offensive. If you would have just told me that, I would have edited it or whatever. So I think that does have value when you say like, okay, here's the thing. Here's the reason and here is the consequence. Yeah. here's the thing, here's the reason,

and here is the consequence. Going back to the, one thing, whatever term people want to call them, whether it's hit pieces or whatever term. I know hit pieces has an inflammatory meaning to it. That's just the first thing that comes to mind. Expose, whatever, as I said, whatever. I think this goes back to a lot of the stuff we were saying earlier you have to be very careful about how they're present and how you how you're presenting

the information how you're conducting yourself because what's live what's like liable what's likely we'll go with that one what's likely to happen i feel like this is what's happened in the recent examples is it hasn't actually moved the needle basically what's happened is you have a lot of people who agree this person was bad already and they're like this is a great video you did great research then you have people who disagree and it's like this is a terrible video you did no research then you have people kind of in the middle some who are oh, I'm aware of this person now Are there I think they're bad and oh, I think I'm I'm worried the person now. I think they're good

Like there's no middle ground being built there it's just you're splitting people into very to very clear camps where it's like you're either against this person or you're for this person and I Don't I don't feel like that's a generally healthy place for a community to be in yeah yeah yeah it's hard because i think i commented on a video that you're referencing of like i think my comment was similar to what i was saying here of like i i sometimes i if i think somebody is uh you know abusive or or whatever bad has bad

interactions like sometimes i i i often hesitate to bring any attention to that you know um and so i i would default to saying like no you shouldn't you shouldn't make this video you shouldn't write the blog post because like you're just drawing attention to this person and at the same time i think if if you're somebody who's had you know very specific uh negative or abusive interactions with somebody like you do want other people to know that that's happened like you do i think there is value in saying like this is the history of this um situation this is the history of this person this is this is the interactions that have happened um yeah yeah Yeah. And it's, it's hard because it does get, it gets personal. You're talking about personal interactions with people and you're not talking about technical

things and that's a whole other, you know, there's so many other, other implications there. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's really hard. hard i think generally if if your intent is to share information and to you know show show something that has happened that people don't know maybe especially like i'm trying to think of an abstract example it's really hard to talk around a lot of stuff but like if if you if you are somebody who's been affected by a you know negative actions of a person and like you also are aware that other people don't know that this has been going on i think it is important to to publicize that to share that um i think there's different ways you can do it i think there's better and worse ways

but i think it is you know thinking an example of like the Me Too movement, you know, of people who were sexually harassed. It's like people might say, oh, you shouldn't make a big fuss about it because whatever, like you should handle it privately. there's power in saying, um, this happened to me. Um, because that can also, um, it can also allow other people who maybe were afraid to speak out about it to, to know, oh, there's other people out there, um, that were affected by this. Like, oh, other people, other people were, were hurt by this or affected by this. So I, yeah, it's, it's really tricky. And I think it's, I don't know if there's a right answer. I don't know. Yeah. I said, even, even I, I watched these videos, I've seen blog posts in the past of different things and I always feel mixed about it. Um, I think, I think if your intent is good and you're not just trying to, if you're not trying to make a hit piece, not trying to just flame somebody, not trying to tear somebody down um i think that can be can be beneficial to to share the perspective what i do

think would have happened oh what would have been beneficial in this case obviously that example is very different um like the me too example like yeah that's like actual criminal things like that's very serious um this is just people disagreeing on the internet and arguing with each other like that's they're very there's like whole very different like levels here um you might argue that it's harassment but like you know there's a difference between internet harassment and like sexual assault like that those are very different levels on the scale um i tried and I... What I would have liked to see, and I kind of wish, even if it happened privately, I would have liked them to have a conversation like this.

Sit down, talk to each other, understand the positions of both people. I've seen the videos as well, and what I've noticed is one party thinks everything is this way, is one party thinks everything is this way the other party thinks everything is this way there is no middle ground being met there there's no there's no uh discussion being had and i feel like just sitting because i know there was some like back and forth text conversation this goes back to what we're saying before text is weird if you can sit down and like talk to someone

and have a face to face discussion I feel like I feel like that you would handle it in a very different way like you if you feel like this person you're talking to is actually they're actually a person you have some level of empathy for their position even if you think they're completely wrong

like there are some people out there that I disagree with every single thing they say but if you can sit down completely wrong. Like, there are some people out there that I disagree with every single thing they say. But if you can sit down and have a conversation with someone, you can at least know why they have that perspective and, like, how they got there and, like, what they're trying to do. Because I think even if you think someone is just a bad person, like, there's

going to be fundamental agreements you have like most of us will agree like we want like good things for our family we want you know we want to spend time with our friends all of these things like even with someone like you think is just a terrible human like there's gonna be those things that you're still gonna agree with yeah so you can you can find common ground you can try to try to understand their perspective yeah yeah i still feel i still feel really mixed up on it yeah i know i do as well i i get there's there's like the like it i mean again i'm like way blowing this out of proportion but if you take it to the extreme and say like you know some evil dictator who kills people whatever like it's like well yeah you can find evil dictator who kills people whatever like it's

like well yeah you can find common ground with them it's like yeah but is that is that worth your time you know like yeah no obviously again obviously extreme and hyperbolic there but like where where is that line right like if you if you if you think somebody is is genuinely harmful and abusive and bad and and is it worth your time to say oh let's sit down and have a chat like maybe if you're doing um you know thinking of it from a journalistic perspective maybe that is what you need to do maybe sitting down and interviewing them talking to them and understanding their point even if you disagree and then you go ahead and publish something that says we sat and talked to this person and here's what they said and here's why i don't believe it that's that is different than just doing kind of an expose

you know from from other other sources or whatever so yeah maybe there's maybe there's something there of like if you're doing it as an informational as an ex as a as a journalistic thing like there is is some extra effort that could be put in to talk to the people. I do generally think like if you have a disagreement with somebody, the first step is talking to them. Yeah.

You know, and reaching out and seeing. And again, the end result might be that you disagree and you still have the same opinions, but at least you did that step of reaching out and talking. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have anything positive to say before we end it uh let's see i'm i'm reading my notes what can i get on

this is a dumb one but i have it in quotes in my notes of um you know there's the classic was it thumper from from bambi my mom always says like if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all whatever i don't know is i don't even is that the right thing is that from bambi i don't know um but um that i've i've i've known people who use that approach to, to interactions. And I think that can be a really, especially when you're talking publicly, you know, generally like public negativity, like being negative is just, it's usually not, even if you're right, it's usually not going to change minds. It's usually not going to be the right thing.

Um, you know, if, if you have a disagreement with a person or a project um see see where you do overlap and see what you can agree on and focus on that and uh you don't have to smear them or talk negative about them necessarily um in the end you know everybody is the hero of their own story everyone thinks they're doing what's right and if you remember that and you try to just align in the ways that you can um i think you'll be more effective going all the way back to the start software is easy people are hard yeah absolutely yeah yeah i i gave a talk at the linux app summit so long ago now probably like 2018 or something that's uh it's not always technical and when you when you're dealing with i mean in open source but it's really anything in the world uh so many

so many of the hard problems are people problems are our communication problems um yeah yeah and as much as you can understand that and do your best to communicate better um you're gonna be in a better place i think i felt like this was a good episode i hope people learned something from it i hope so too um we had less and less disagreements than i thought we did but hey that's uh that's fine um that's good yeah yeah um i guess uh direct people wherever i know you mentioned the flat hub blog before so that was over on what's the website for that one yeah the the url is kind of annoying because it's it's on the docs site so it's docs.flathub.org slash blog um we should probably redirect blog.flathub there or something but yeah uh if you gotta go to the flat hub blog um there's some good stuff there

i'm hoping to get another post there soon maybe by the time people are watching this um and then yeah my website where you can find links to everything else that i do on the internet is just cassidyjames.com awesome so there's links to my mastodon and github and all that stuff out there if you want to interact and chat you got a link to when you're on the show that's cool oh yeah that's right yeah yeah i try to do that with like recent like kind of podcast or video appearances whatever because it's like yeah people want to people want to hear from me who want to see see what i've talked about that's that's there um i'm also going to plug you know if you're interested in open source uh especially on the gnome or gtk side and you are in the u.s or the americas uh

this july guadec is happening i'm very excited about it if you have a lot of money and you like to fly yeah that too yeah yeah uh it is a technically it is a hybrid conference this year so there will be remote presentations and everything will be live streamed and of course you know time zones are still a thing so it can be hard but everything will be recorded and live streamed um but if you can make it in person as we were saying uh i think that face-to-face in-person um communication and hanging out and doing the social stuff i think is super valuable if you can swing it um it's always squad isix always my favorite time of year for for open source what's happening this year did you say uh it's happening in late july in denver colorado usa

so it's uh guadix.org we'll take you to the 1600 for me to get there oh yeah yeah i mean you're probably like worst case scenario if you look at the globe you're like literally opposite side of the globe i'm kind of worst case they're not like worst case scenario. If you look at the globe, you're like literally opposite side of the globe. I'm kind of worst case. Like there's someone who invited me to come down to, there's a developer conference in Brisbane later this year. And that's fine. I can get to Brisbane.

That's a couple of hundred. Yeah, you're like, that's not flying literally around the world. I consider there's some other stuff that happens in like Sydney. Like, yeah, I can do Sydney. That works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've joked, I've said we need to make Guadec in more diverse locations. We need to have it in Australia one year. We need to have it in, I don't know, the Philippines or something.

We could have it in South Africa. I don't know, just spread it out a bit more. But it is hard. If you're not going to have all your regular contributors show up then it it limits the value of the event a bit but yeah if you can swing it if you can make it in the u.s and not you personally brody if you're not gonna oh definitely i don't want to do it one year for sure but yeah yeah maybe when it's a little closer to home for you but yeah i highly recommend that if you're ever interested it's super it's a super fun time and i'm helping organize it so i'm biased there of course but

um yeah and i will say if you if you were interested i guess by the time this publishes the call for papers is probably going to be closed yeah it'll be like mid-march so at this point remote i believe yeah remote um presentations will still be accepted through mid to late March, I believe. So after the GNOME 46 release. So if you wanted to give a presentation about something adjacent to GNOME and weren't able to do it in person, you can still submit your talk for remote talk and that'd be cool. we'd love to see you awesome uh anything else you want to mention is that it i think that's about it awesome um as for me i have my main channel brody robertson i do linux videos there six-ish days a week check it out see what's over

there i got no idea at this point uh i've got my gaming channel that is brody on games i'm i'm definitely done with neptunia by now i don't know what my next game is going to be. Might be God of War 2? I don't know. Check it out. Might be Devil May Cry 4. See what's over there. I've got my React channel now,

where if I decide to watch something on stream, I'll just clip it out and put it up. There's literally no effort there. If you want the most unscripteded rambly content you will ever find where i will watch a 15 minute video and turn it into like two hours go check that out uh i think recently there should be a video that comes out about uh the linux rap battle that happened a few years back that someone sent me a clip they they they thing and i don't know if you saw this when it happened but there was like a DistroTube challenge

to a bunch of Linux YouTubers to a rap battle. I'll send you some of the masks, but they're really bad. Fascinating. And someone like two weeks ago released another one. It's like, here, I'm just better than all of you. And they were better than all of us. Amazing.

The podcast, if you're listening to this, the audio release, it uh on every video no audio release hold up video released on youtube tech committee if you're watching the video you can find the audio any podcast platform there is an rss feed uh i have too many things to talk about in the outro now um yeah the reaction channel is brody ro Robertson reacts temporarily. I might change the name. Anyway, what do you want to say? Uh, it's the end of the show. Give me final words.

Oh, geez. Um, be, let's see. Yeah. Um, remember that every behind every username, there's a real person with real feelings. How do we not say that throughout the entire show? I don't know, but if you keep that in mind, it can help a lot.

Yeah, absolutely. Catch you guys later. Cheers.