Why are open source projects too rigid and stuck in dogmatic position ?

take for example mastodon, its CEO recently posted a toot asking who has already considered deleting facebook / threads after the recent controversies, but on the other hand ignores that his stubbornness about certain points like not adding quotes just doesn’t make the project appealing for ordinary people, this feature has been the most request since twitter exodus two years ago. and at every surge of new users mastodon struggles to keep them using the platform, why do these projects struggle to acknowledge what people want the most and deliver on it.

another example is LibreOffice, I was trying to get acclimated to this new office suite and was happy to find that I can theme it to my liking to ease up my transition. but it wasn’t long before I found out how tiny dogmatic decision really pushes to give up on it. I found that LO doesn’t auto-capitalise first letter after line breaks but only after end of sentences, something Word has been doing as long as I can remember, LO argument is that only a . and ! characters mark the end of a sentence in “proper English”. line breaks don’t qualify as a proper end of a sentence for them.

For people coming from proprietary software that among many short comings still strive to offer the best features and smoothest user experience, it is hard to try and stick to open source projects and even contribute back.

Should big OSS project shift to more democratic structures, where decisions are made based on consensus? or do you think the actual models are fine, and I am an entitled user ??

  • andypiper
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    74 days ago

    You know that Mastodon is implementing quote posts though, right?

    • @[email protected]OP
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      -64 days ago

      on their website’s roadmap section it says it is planned. I don’t know how much work has been done on that. mean while Mastodon’s userbase is dwindling, and it hasn’t been able to capitalize on the many waves of exodus and twitter controversies for over two years now

      • @[email protected]
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        53 days ago

        it hasn’t been able to capitalize on the many waves of exodus and twitter controversies for over two years now

        You’re making the assumption that it wants to.

        The goals of Mastodon are very different from Twitter.

      • astro_ray
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        43 days ago

        If you want quote post right now, without having to wait for mastodon to implement it, why not just use misskey or any other *key fork.

      • @[email protected]
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        44 days ago

        and it hasn’t been able to capitalize on the many waves of exodus and twitter controversies for over two years now

        Capitalize in what way? We’re not in a competition with Xitter or anyone else for users.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          04 days ago

          Capitalize, meaning to translate those new sign-ups into monthly active user, buy doing a better job at exposing the potential of the fediverse and easing up the exploration process of interesting content.