Tildes and Deimos appreciation & how can we help?
Designing, coding, moderating, promoting and doing all the business admin on Tildes must be fairly thankless. But without all this effort we'd not be able to enjoy discussions with each other & share all this interesting content. I don't feel that much appreciation is really shown on here (except maybe miss-voting on all Deimos' comments).
But it is a little awkward, spurious thanks all over the place would just be noise. I thought I'd make a topic especially for people to say thanks in. I'm really enjoying Tildes content and discussion. Plus I'm a big believer in the goals of Tildes as laid out in the docs.
So I'd like to say a big thank you to Deimos and other useful contributors! Thanks for making the site we have to use today and dreaming of the hopefully better possible site we'll see in the future.
I'm also hoping to start a discussion on what enthusiastic Tildes users can do to most usefully help make Tildes good now and better in the future.
A list of stuff we can do:
-
Obviously posting lots of good content and interesting discussions. Voting honestly and using comment labels judiciously.
-
You can donate and currently we can see Tildes Patreon is at $375 a month. Deimos posted some more figures recently.
-
We all regularly get invite codes and bringing in more people who can get excited (and maybe also help) is obviously good.
-
The issue tracker and bug reports are all public so you can make suggestions, vote or comment on existing ones and perhaps more usefully see if you can work out how to reproduce reported bugs.
-
As of a bit over two months ago Tildes is open source. This means you can track down bugs from the issue tracker or even contribute code for new features.
RFC:
So are other people liking Tildes? What is it you like? Are you excited enough to want to help out?
Also is there anything useful users can do I've missed? In these already mentioned areas what's actually most useful to do? Are some things of negative use? Could Deimos change his process to make more use of community help? Is there anything Deimos could delegate that people would be willing to volunteer on? Gitlab Walmart greeter would be cool but is anyone willing to do it?
To answer my own question without derailing every one else.
Having submitted some merge requests I think it would be good if there was more community involvement around this process. I think it would be better if Deimos could respond somewhat faster to Gitlab activity even if it came at the expense of completeness or even politeness. Contributors should perhaps review each others code. Merge requests that've gone a couple of days without comment should get at least a nice 'hey thanks for getting involved' message.
I've made a couple of merge requests to close issues that looked useful & doable. In both cases this required some iterative code review from Deimos. I'm really not certain if my efforts were a net time saver for him. I think it's likely that the time to review and integrate my changes was longer than if he'd just done it directly himself!
This was on my mind recently due to the LKML CoC discussions. Deimos' responses to merge requests are fantastic: detailed, unfailingly polite and full of constructive feedback... Which has to take a relatively long time for him to write. Since he's a busy dude this means that the feedback can be pretty slow in arriving. So I was there thinking: "Wouldn't it be better all around if Deimos would just make some off colour remarks about my ancestry and I could move on and he could do this himself and we'd all save time"! :)
So I'm not genuinely courting abuse from Deimos and perhaps he thinks the upfront effort is worth while since contributors may stick around over the long term. If that's the case merges requests (and especially first timers). Should get faster responses to keep people from feeling unwanted.
I think the solution is that good contributors should be empowered to comment on and review other's contributions. Especially when Deimos is too busy to respond. I don't know if this takes the form of Deimos declaring open season for GitLab comments or if he would rather DM some of the competent people and see if they would mind getting involved?
While I definitely would encourage more people to start using Tildes Gitlab, especially for bug reporting and voting on features they want most (so Deimos can be better informed when deciding where to put his focus), I also think keeping it a bit sacrosanct isn't a bad thing either. Having it flooded with tons of unfocused comments and unrealistic/outlandish suggestions would make it far less useful for actual development of the site. IMO ~tildes is a better place for those more broad feature discussions and brainstorming, rather than Gitlab.
p.s. I think some appreciation is also due to you too, super_james... as well as all the other opensource/Gitlab contributors!