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Community contributions to Element Web (Matrix client) are often not welcomed (github.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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It seems that community contributions to Element Web (Matrix client) are often effectively rejected. For example, see:

There are also many other PRs for Element Web/Desktop which have not gotten a review in a timely manner (see here). The request to improve the ~~terrible~~ notification sound has been there since 2017, and though several PRs have been submitted to improve it, they have been either ignored or rejected for an unknown reason (there should be an epic project going on which should make the six-year-wait legitimate).

When it comes to development of Element, there is a lot of unspoken, unwritten, internally shared rules among the internal team members. Your PR will be effectively rejected even if it works, unless it aligns with their goals, which you cannot know before submitting a PR.

It should be well noted that there is a clear and strict division between the internal paid workers and external volunteer developers who essentially provide the team free labor. The exclusive attitude of the team behind Element has discouraged the latter from contributing to the project. I myself have been one of the active localization volunteers, but I stopped contributing after I realized it has been free labor.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There's a difference between contributing self-contained code, and changing a protocol that has to live forever. The receiving organization is making a commitment to honor all protocol changes, for very long time for compatibility reasons. They're allowed to have opinions about that. I'm sorry it didn't work out for these people, but somebody has to own the protocol, and the API, and the risk surface.

The way it is implemented, custom emoji are sent as short codes only with the rendering happening on the receiving side. This creates a rather large vector for abuse and we're not gonna accept it in this form.

Separately from that, the Spec Core Team expects to land custom emoji / sticker packs in Matrix v1.9 which is due in November. Given how close this is, we think that it's worth blocking this contribution to align on a proper solution on the spec level. I'd encourage you to engage with the spec process on the various MSCs around this feature to help influence the decision making.

This is just how large software works. You got to work with a large group. You can't make sweeping changes on your own. It's slow, it's cumbersome, but hopefully group effort is greater than the sum of its parts.

I don't see anything here that's unreasonable on behalf of element

I think the main difference between community contributors and paid developers is just the timeline they're looking at. How far into the future are they looking, are they looking at technical debt, are they seeing this as some burden the organization has to carry. It's a subtle difference, but it does change how people react and accept new things.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I should add nothing's preventing people from forking the code base and maintaining their own independent distribution. Much like there's multiple versions of new pipe both with and without sponsor block.

So it might be frustrating that changes aren't accepted, but because it's open source those changes can live on, and if you get enough people to adopt your fork, you can become the de facto standard. That's kind of democratic software

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What you might missed is that there are some PRs merged without adding or changing a spec (as a experimental function), others rejected after long silence. I agree completely with you about the group effort, but at first you would need to create a group at first, where you could discuss with the community (or notify them) what to be implemented, improved, etc. The team has lacked that kind of effort, and most of the communication take place privately.

I am not the author of the PR but sympathetic due to the effort the author has put to the PR for a year, which at first received reviews from a member which let the author expect that it was going to be accepted with necessary changes somehow, only to be notified by another member that the new spec change should cover the area the author has worked. If there had been a communication channel which worked between the team and the community, this kind of miscommunications should have not happened in the first place.

This PR is just an example; there are other cases where the volunteers were not included in the communication.

You probably would be able to see the same kind of problem more clearly on the issue for the notification sound improvement, which do not require a spec and the design team has said they were working on implementation several years ago and ignored comments for follow-ups since then, which is obviously not a healthy attitude toward the community.

Still, Element is not a community-owned project after all, so it is it might make more sense to fork it as you said. like Forgejo was forked from Gitea. There is in fact a fork of Element, SchildiChat.