>Participating in such group requires so big an investment of time and attention that it instantly shuts off anyone who has a day job or other interests and responsibilities.
depending on the kind of OS project, that may be more of a boon than a hinderance. There is always good talent put off by some factors in life, but there are always a lot more actors (some bad, some simply ignorant) that may make the project more of a strain than a collaborative effort.
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I'll also emphasize that unless you are a part of an enormous hub without proper structure, the "chat flow" isn't as heavy as you'd expect at first blush. Its much more annoying to log on and read the day's messages, but the number of relevant messages may be in the dozens that take 10 minutes to skim, not thousands that takes a part time job to parse. But even then it makes sense; for those super large OS repos, there are in fact people doing it as part or full time jobs
Take a look at Zephyr RTOS, for instance. It's all behind a fucking discord. It's a pain in the ass compared to something like Nordic Semiconductor's Devzone. The fact that I have to join a tech support channel for my job with the same profile I use to join 18+ furry roleplay servers (discord requires a phone number that can receive texts and I don't have a work phone) is a sign that something here is a problem.
well yes, that's always an issue with popular social media. That's why I make sure my 18+ furry roleplay account is different from the professional one.
> I'll also emphasize that unless you are a part of an enormous hub without proper structure, the "chat flow" isn't as heavy as you'd expect at first blush.
For values of "enormous" starting at "a dozen people".
Elsewhere in the thread I wrote about my Hackerspace experience. At the point I started drifting away from the community, we had ~100 people active at least every now and then, some ~30 present and at least occasionally active on IRC (later Telegram), and 5 people generating 1000+ messages between 09:00 and 17:00 on every regular working day. By volume, 50% could be casual shitposting, 30% interesting technical conversations, and 20% something relevant to the community - but 100% of it was a bonding experience.
No surprise that the people generating most of the chat backlog volume were also seen as the "core" / most involved participants.
1000 messages in a work day sounds like a lot even for a decently popular game discord. That sounds like it goes beyond "active participants" and more like "eternally online" people.
You already made your choice, but there is something worth considering on if you even want to be a part of a group (even if you had all that free time). I find it interesting that this post came up later after I came back to this comment:
depending on the kind of OS project, that may be more of a boon than a hinderance. There is always good talent put off by some factors in life, but there are always a lot more actors (some bad, some simply ignorant) that may make the project more of a strain than a collaborative effort.
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I'll also emphasize that unless you are a part of an enormous hub without proper structure, the "chat flow" isn't as heavy as you'd expect at first blush. Its much more annoying to log on and read the day's messages, but the number of relevant messages may be in the dozens that take 10 minutes to skim, not thousands that takes a part time job to parse. But even then it makes sense; for those super large OS repos, there are in fact people doing it as part or full time jobs