this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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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 ??

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Mastodon can be janky and it is honestly hard to use, especially of you never used Twitter either. For me, Libreoffice does its thing and ocuppies much less space and less intrusive than Microsoft Office. Open-source projects tend to be less polished than commercial ones due to lack of funding. 98% of open-source projects are completly free, while things like Microsoft license keys cost the price of a lower-end computer