The Rust project has a burnout problem

I realize I am in minority, but for me, if project uses a mailing list I am more likely to do a drive-by contribution (compared to no contribution at all). Just doing git send-email is much easier compared to figuring out how to create whatever pull request is called in whatever forge the specific project is using.

As an Eastern European I always found fascinating how many Westerners are struggling hard with this. To me and many of my peers (and apparently to Linus Torvalds and a good chunk of the entire Nordic culture, probably?) it's the easiest thing in the world to say something like:

"Listen up dickhead, I do this in my free time. If you don't like the direction of the project or the urgency with which your issues are [not] being addressed, you are free to not use it, and it also costs you nothing to not comment at all. I got better things to do than to reply to entitled cunts, now piss off."

It's very amusing what a huge drama many Westerners make out of just... being direct. Honest. Straight to the point.

"But he won't ever contribute and he might infect others with the opinion that the project leaderships is toxic!"

OK. That's a price I am willing to pay. My mental health > the second-hand opinion of people who were only 0.1% likely to contribute anyway. The math is very easy yet so many Westerners struggle so much with these [to me and many] mega obvious solutions, like "be a bit of a dick when necessary".

This is really very similar to the discussions I had with a lot of women long time ago. It goes like this: they tell me:

"I have to go tell X and Y about event A because otherwise Z will tell them lies and they'll think something wrong about me."

To which I reply with a cold expression: "Then you don't need X and Y in your life, if they can be so easily influenced by lies and won't even ask you about what truly happened."

Their expressions were priceless. The cognitive dissonance can hit us all VERY hard.

Back to the topic at hand, yes, I firmly believe all open-contribution projects need a Linus type of person. It's also a fact that many devs are introverted and can be chased away by entitled and insolent loud people. So somebody must put a shield in front of the devs.

Cheers!

But it didn't start off that way. I shepherded it -almost entirely alone- for a decade, before I found a dedicated, motivated team that I trusted to take it over.

They have done wonders for it. Most of its explosive expansion has taken off, under their watch.

Walking away from it was the best thing that I could do for it. The last thing these folks need, is a "Benevolent Dictator," peering over their shoulders, and giving suggestions.

During the gestation decade, I had to be a not-so-benevolent dictator, many times, as people tried to take it over, change it to suit narrow sub-demographics (at the expense of everyone else), and even change its entire raison d'etre. I got a ton of pretty vicious hate mail and there are people that still hate me (I cry myself to sleep over that, every night), after a decade. In one instance, I had to wait until one nasty old bastard popped his clogs, before I could spread it to the entire Pacific Northwest.

During that time, I learned how not to behave. A lot of that hate, was because I'm actually pretty good at slapping back, but I really needed to learn diplomacy. Even when they are nasty, and we are right, we often need to just swallow our pride, and let the dervishes whirl.

I don't miss working on it, and I'm really glad the new team are doing so good with it. I suspect there's very little of my original code in it, but the team mindset is still very much what I established.

I am about to release a project that actually uses that infrastructure as a feeder to my backend.