I can't help but to feel just like the author of this article.
I'm vastly in favor of taxing and hurdles as natural filters. Mainstream spoils everything (~almost). You end up having people not really into things, endless debates about side features, about how to organize the projects (inclusiveness, code of conducts, tooling), scandals and less about the passion of doing the thing.
I'm often amazed at the difference in pacing and communication on Mailing Lists. It's slower but denser.
Remember Slashdot and the "Slashdot Effect"? Slashdot was pretty much a forum for FOSS. It was already mainstream. And this is 1998 or so. The GNOME team caused massive drama when they started their campaign against Qt (and, thus, KDE) on Slashdot.
And on that point, GNOME was a reactionary project. It was not started as a community of people coming together to create good software. It simply wasn't. I was there (mostly observing from the Gtk+/GIMP side at the horror show). Gnumeric was slapped together in like one day. It was pure 100% trash code. All that CORBA, ORBit, etc. stuff was tossed together. GNOME was a movement that feared KDE would beat them to the "Linux on the desktop", and their initial versions were designed to play catch-up with KDE's feature set. I can't overstate how shit early GNOME code was. And then they took to Slashdot to bash the less-than-free Qt because GNOME certainly wasn't winning on merit alone.
The free software community has been a shitshow for as long as such a thing has existed. Go back to the homebrew movement and see how people reacted to Bill Gates selling proprietary software.
It's called nostalgia, and we pretty much all have that condition.
There are some fields or scenes where I recall how it used to be magical, but I know my mind is playing with me.
Many people think that it's too much, too many apps, too many people, too much complexity. Yes. That may be the case and this may not suit everyone, especially those who lived through a pretty magical period with the birth of the world wide Web, or BBS, or open source movement, or the free software movement. Yes, god damn, that has got to make someone nostalgic. However, all that is now is not 'just' ruining it. The Beatles are what they are because of all the people who've never been to their concerts who wish they had been, amplified by people who were there who thought Paul sucked at guitar at the time. People mostly are indifferent to shifts in the now, and only cling to the now when it becomes the good old days or when someone makes a documentary about it and we feel we belong special for belonging to something that is not anymore.
This says much more about us, our desire to belong, to be special, than it says about what reality is or was. We can apply this to forums people thought sucked until they disappear and the memories kick in.
it's too much, not enough, and too many issues around
I like more balanced meals in a way
And it's a bit objective too. IRC, Mailing lists did a lot with few. Now you have to have discord/slack/zulip to .. do the same ? consider the average website bloat.
It's not pure nostalgia (I can realize my biases a bit)
I'm not being dismissive and I'm not reducing the whole piece. I still look for an IRC channel and a mailing list for something by default when I want to join something.
The Python IRC channel and mailing lists are top notch, with lengthy debates and great advice. The excerpt sounds like what an old geezer, in the soul, would say. I recognize it because I sometimes catch myself thinking like that.
I'm vastly in favor of taxing and hurdles as natural filters. Mainstream spoils everything (~almost). You end up having people not really into things, endless debates about side features, about how to organize the projects (inclusiveness, code of conducts, tooling), scandals and less about the passion of doing the thing.
I'm often amazed at the difference in pacing and communication on Mailing Lists. It's slower but denser.