Buggy software, not so user friendly, things don’t work, new things to learn…
Sometimes you just wanna do a simple thing and you cannot do it and that really undermines your self esteem.
You try to find little working solutions when big techs with armies of engeneers and programmers are working against you.
Aurora store stopping to work, apps getting blocked on lineage os or rooted phones, Reddit cleaning out all those amazing third party apps, Linux that wanna make you destroy your pc at times, Firefox remaining the only real alternative to chromium (only god knows for how long yet), google wanting to DRM everything, ig blocking my account because i was using barinsta (i cannot even delete it), Newpipe getting stuck after 1/4 of the video.
Sometimes you find half of your software stops working and you need to go and understand why, fixing or checking for alternatives…
Is it possible that we have from one side mass tracking and surveilance and from the other a (sometimes understandibly quite not organized) series of freely mainteined software.
Can’t we just find a new way of monetize stuff without ads? So that we can build really nicely working software without all the shit that comes from the need of having to track the user? Are there real alternatives? We need to get organized and actually starting to build a better web and software, but i really think an economical incentive is still very much needed for it to be stable and usable by everyone.
Sorry this is more of a rant than a real post, sometimes everything really gets frustrating and you have to deal with much more serious shit in life that doesn’t leave time for checking out why your Newpipe, your gps or home server doesn’t work…
There is one good example of a good FOSS project with reliable funding and a thriving community, which is blender.
You know why blender is a success unlike other projects . Because it a very complicated piece of software that most of the community can’t just fork or start another project. so for FOSS projects to thrive they need more convergence of developpers to the same project . rather than divergence of efforts into multiple of projects. I know that this is not how FOSS works. but the reality is that without an urge to devellop projects in rivalary with the commercial ones. the resulting quality will always be mediocre.
another problem is the lack of proper documentation, It it very hard and time consuming to get familiarised with complex project codes. many of them are lacking proper documentation to encouraged newer devs to join in. the reality is that this takes time away from coding into documentation, but its an important ressource to encourage growth and participtation.
You make a good point with Blender being too complex of a beast to divert the effort into forks. I rely on Blender to put bread on the stable and this is only possible because of the funding & development stability.