I want to give a heads up to everyone who runs, or is thinking about running an open source project. If your project sees ANY notoriety and you are the maintainer, you will quickly find yourself in this situation. In 2013, I started a little side open source project and put it on GitHub which now has 5.2k stars. I've seen tons of arguments in my PR's over the previous 7 years. My project isn't even that large and I've seen lots of in fighting to the point where I've had to lock threads. The skills required for you to run a successful open spruce project are the same skills required for you to run a business. You're going to need people skills and understand how to de-escalate situations because once the community is large enough, there will be a lot of culture conflicts. The main challenge with open source is that if you're not getting actively incentivized (Paid for me) to maintain something that's super popular, it's easy to abandon it when things get hard.
It must depend on the project in ways I don't understand. Certainly while working on Firefox I saw tons of toxic behavior from users, and sometimes potential contributors. I've seen it in lots of other projects that I haven't worked on. But for rr (4.7K Github stars) I have seen none whatsoever. I wish I could explain the difference, but I can't.
rr is only useful to people with a minimal level of knowledge, and in most cases to people who have stood in your shoes. Firefox is useful to any six-year-old with a cellphone. Maybe that explains the difference.
That could explain the difference between rr and Firefox, but it doesn't explain the difference between rr and all the other developer-oriented projects with toxicity issues.
There's variance in developer experience and skill as well. The software's purpose functions as an audience filter. There are still probably toxic people out there using your software, but not as many so they're less likely to bother you.
From what I've read about rr, it sounds like awesome black magic, and I'd imagine most users appreciate how difficult its task is.
