Its a very interesting feeling. On one hand Im proud because Lemmy has come so far. Two years ago there was only one instance dev.lemmy.ml and no federation. On the other hand disappointed, because some people are unable to appreciate how much time and work I put into this project. Its especially ironic that these attacks are coming from people who pretend to represent the working class.
With respect I don’t think it’s the work you put into the project that people have a problem with but rather the way you engage with people, take criticism rather poorly, and completely dismiss absolutely everyone that has any experience with community building.
The issue is not the work you do but a seeming lack of understanding of how your actions and the way you engage with others seriously affects people’s motivation to help grow the project. I am a supporter of the project but you told me to go back to reddit when I was airing something I genuinely cared about.
Most of the problems occurring are not even your disagreement with people but the manner in which you frame your disagreements and engage very harshly with others.
On the topic of the bad blood occurring between this instance and its sister lemmygrad - this is a product of poor communication and a wrecker group that has seized upon this and pulled the thread on both sites with the goal of splitting the two.
The main site considers to label itself a “leftist” site when it clearly is no longer that, it’s clearly a dev instance with some vaguely left stuff but has undertaken a neutral ideology out of necessity so as not to alienate certain audiences further. This has occurred but the references to it being “leftist” have never been removed and no effort to get ahead of the obvious upset this would cause in your originally marxist-leninist audience seems to have been made. What do you expect? Think ahead. If you change a site from being marxist-leninist to being something else when the existing people who all joined it originally were marxist-leninists and you do absolutely nothing to bring them on-board with the change of course they’re going to be upset.
I don’t even think any of these mistakes are unfixable. I was going to try and head off some of these problems I could see coming but then the queen died so my entire priority list go upended. But you need to wrap your head around communities and how to engage with communities if you’re going to dev for a project about building communities. That or figure out someone who is shit-hot at communications and have them do all of your communications for you instead.