• he/him

I've not gotten any good at writing descriptions since I first made my tumblr and by god I'm not about to start now.


www.in-mutual-weirdness.tumblr.com

blackle
@blackle

my underdeveloped opinion on cohost (which likely comes from having not read the manifesto) is that I don't fully understand the ideology that is ruling out volunteer work. it seems contradictory to the fact that we post as volunteers. the entire css crimes community was volunteers, and in doing so we got cohost on The Verge. that helped cohost. what is stopping it from accepting our help in a larger capacity?


blackle
@blackle

based on my experience over the last four months running a hackerspace, it's become clear that people want to see a good thing thrive. and that means being flexible, having trust, and asking for help when you need it.

it seems that the major difference though is that my hackerspace is a non-profit, but cohost is a cooperative. perhaps the ideological problem is that a for-profit company should never take labour for free. that's commendable, but the fact of the matter is that the world needs cohost. it seems like a good chunk of our members came from cohost and from that we are incredibly close to being financially sustainable ourselves. YOUR success is OUR success.

if cohost weathers this storm through volunteer labour, then all we ask is you pay it forward. if cohost doesn't survive, then nothing more good can come from it.

EDIT: I don't write this to demand that cohost goes open source or w/e. what I'm trying to say is the entire community understands if the ideology is bent a bit to make this great thing thrive.


Inumo
@Inumo

As someone who has done community-critical volunteer work before, I think the desire to avoid accepting volunteer labor goes beyond ethics around money (though that is probably a major component). Quite simply, the best volunteers are also the ones who are most likely to burn out, and that burnout can hit so hard that it either leaves them avoiding the very thing they helped build or leads them to harmful, self-serving decisions. Old BBCode forum moderators become simultaneously draconian and capricious, or they just disappear from the forum entirely. Masto admins at best withdraw to secluded corners of the platform and at worst bail from the platform entirely, whether or not they nuke their reputation beforehand. Coders get sick of constantly working to improve a system, only for the rest of the community to reject or at least not appreciate those efforts, until they decide the whole thing is bunk & start denouncing it to their friends. In short, while volunteer labor may produce a better product, it also creates volunteer churn that can lead to random pockets of animosity later down the line. From a "we want people to like using Cohost" perspective, then, volunteer burnout is a losing proposition – you're likely ruining people on Cohost in the hopes of making it a better website. From a "we want to maximize Cohost's lifetime" perspective, Cohost still depends a lot on people saying "yeah Cohost is Good Actually" and is already dealing with random pockets of animosity (with varying degrees of fact-based criticism). Adding volunteer burnouts who can fuel those fires only makes the struggle for survival worse, and you can only hope the value-add of volunteer labor's products can counteract that challenge.

Obviously paying people doesn't ameliorate burnout per se—just ask nonprofit employees—but it does do a few useful things: establish a hierarchy of priorities, provide a clear standard for "is the work worth it" (i.e. "is doing this work worth $X to me"), and define a working relationship with a simple exit plan (You Can Just Quit). I think it's an understandable and respectable choice, then, to avoid accepting volunteer labor & try to pursue other routes towards stability first. As the financial update implies, I don't think staff is 100% ruling out volunteer labor as a possible necessary path to keep Cohost alive, just that they'd rather keep things within their (paid) worker-owned co-op if they can help it.

2 hours later PS: I do wanna also be clear that like, none of the knock-on effects of volunteer labor & burnout like, "irreparably taint" a project or something. I am & will continue to be a Masto user, I have & will hopefully one day again volunteer my time/energy/knowledge in local kink spaces. I just also know that the costs of volunteering are often missed because of missing direct experience, cultural pressures (e.g. Microsoft loves to cultivate FOSS dev because it's basically free labor), or optimistic attitudes around avoiding burnout (it's an inevitability that is managed, not a problem that is solved).



its-chaboi
@its-chaboi

Have you ever noticed that no one who compares anything to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire ever seems to know anything about actual "late" Roman history?

"Look at how decadent we've become! It's just like the Roman Empire. Mark my words, soon the barbarians will be at the gates and we're going to

-almost completely collapse
-almost completely recover but with a more authoritarian political system
-split the country between four different Presidents who will then fight in a civil war tournament bracket to see who gets to unite it again
-move the capital to Kansas City
-adopt Scientology as our official state religion
-have some more civil wars and also fight the Mexicans every so often
-fuck up our border policy so bad that the Canadians invade and sack DC
-then everything east of the Mississippi will be governed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for 50 years until one day the Canadians just sort of slide in and take it over
-but everything west of the Mississippi will be more or less OK all things considered and they'll just kind of let the Canadians govern the East, until one day there's a real go-getter in the Western Presidency and he conquers pretty much the whole East again for a bit
-lose like half our population in a plague
-have a gigantic three decade long war with Mexico that we narrowly win
-get almost entirely conquered out of nowhere by a militant new religious movement that suddenly comes out of the Sonoran Desert
-hang on for 700 years behind the powerful walls of New Kansas City, periodically regaining enough strength to reconquer the whole Midwest, and occasionally inviting in the Canadians to give us a hand and/or screw us over because they subscribe to a somewhat different flavor of Scientology, before finally getting put out of our misery by the successor empire to the successor empire to the successor empire to the original new religious movement that fucked us up so bad earlier

unless we ban avocado toast, reintroduce school prayer, and put WASPs in charge of everything again"



kylelabriola
@kylelabriola

Something I've realized more now as I've gotten older is that people generally overestimate how much a small indie team can get done when working on a big project like a game or a website.

And two factors that come to mind that are obstacles for small teams are:

  • The "front end" and "back end" type stuff is separate and when you have to spend a month working on more behind-the-scenes "back end" stuff, people wonder why you aren't adding more forward-facing features or content

  • Everything in life can really bring everything to a screeching halt. "My dog is sick", "I had a death in the family", "I was traveling last week", "I'm struggling with depression," "I got sick yesterday", "I'm having trouble sorting my taxes", "My car got a flat tire on Monday." These things can bring development down to a crawl and there's really nothing that can be done if hiring more people isn't possible. If your team has like 5 people, there's not a lot of room for people who can pick up tasks when someone is out of commission.

So really, best case scenario is that expectations should be set that users/players don't expect a constant river's flow of new updates. It's really hard to live up to expectation, especially expectations that are usually set from bigger teams.

(or sometimes the expectation of pace is set when the project first starts and motivation is sky-high and the creator or creators are working day-and-night obsessively)

And it also sucks that people generally want "transparency" on these things, therefore you might be obligated to actually share to the public that your grandma died or whatever to justify why you're going slow. It's like you're asking your users for forgiveness.


kylelabriola
@kylelabriola

thinking about small teams again for no Particular Reason. it's a tough life!!!