First, thanks for participating in the discussion and writing such a detailed in-depth comment.

No code is perfect and people can get really self aware about that. I know I have had imposter syndrome in the past where I thought my code was shit, but people always complemented me on the result. Opening up the code can lead to people seeing how shit it really is and call you out on it. The code is probably fine, but it’s a legit fear.

No codebase is perfect and if someone just comments stuff like ‘yOuR cOde iS gArbAge’ you can tell them to fuck off or to refactor the code and submit a merge request. Don’t be embarrassed of your code or and be honest about it if you know that a part of your code sucks but you don’t have time to rewrite it.

Somebody contacted me to take it over, but I feel like he wasn’t serious about it. He just wanted to keep it running and be the owner, but not do any of the things needed to get it back on track.

Well, if you can’t find a good maintainer to take over your project and you need to abandon it, you can open source it and mark it as archived on GitHub. Maybe someone wants to build something similar in the future and can use your project as a reference. Also, maybe it’s not gonna be useful to anyone, but you don’t lose anything by making the code public after you already abandoned the project.

As for still active projects:

With open source people expect you to provide a way to report issues and respond to those publicly, with many people adding their 2 cents and big discussions. If you don’t see it the same as they do, or your solution isn’t what they expected or you simply aren’t fast enough, it’s a problem.

You don’t have to accept feature requests from people. You can either say that you only accept bug reports, or people can submit feature requests but you won’t implement them, and they will only be implemented if someone submits a merge request with a patch. You can also entirely turn off issues on GitHub and just do whatever you want.

We’ve all seen flame wars and stubborn developers on open source projects, the drama factor is real.

This rather only happens with big projects like Linux desktop environments or stuff like that (e.g. there has been a massive flame war between GNOME and KDE users)

Forks. Simultaneous the strongest and weakest part of modern open source software. On the one hand it’s awesome we can make multiple versions if the needs diverge or the original devs abandon the project. But on the other hand, it leaves you with very little control over the project. One case I’ve seen one dev worked on a project almost every Sunday as a hobby, the project was popular and had a tight community which grew a bit big. The amount of open issues grew and bigger tasks just didn’t fit in the original dev’s schedule. One of the community members was a good dev who just got laid off and had some extra time. So he forked the project and spent some weeks working on it fulltime, fixing a lot and expanding the project. The original dev wasn’t happy, it was his hobby and the community fragmented over people using the new version and the original version. Everybody was upset and the original dev called it quits and said talk to the new dev. The new dev however got a new job and also abandoned the project, with nobody left to pick up the pieces. The community was already fractured and people stopped using it.

Sure, rare cases like these exist and it’s unfortunate, but I wouldn’t say that his happens very often. All in all, I still think that open source is the best way.

AirVPN

That’s great, I wish you the best of luck on your journey towards freedom.

You can switch to Linux before Windows 10 becomes unsupported. The sooner the better for you, your privacy and your digital freedom in general.

Use Firefox. The only major Browser that is not developed by some greedy Big Tech corporation.

Just don’t let the horrible user interface scare you. The service is really awesome though.

deleted by creator

They clearly say on their Website that they don’t care about you torrenting on their service, they are probably the last privacy-respecting VPN that still allows port-forwarding, you can pay with Monero, the entire company is run by privacy-activists, they stand values like net-neutrality and fight against censorship. They also donate to organizations like the Tor Project, Mastodon, PeerTube, OpenNIC, OpenBSD, the EFF and Riseup.

And they allow you to pay with Monero, truly awesome.

AirVPN

Germany, and I think many other EU states do this as well. But keep in mind, just like in Estonia, this is only for local elections, you can’t vote for anything at national level like the president or the parliament without a citizenship.

Why do ISPs, CDNs and other digital service providers store all kinds of data then? Not just IP addresses, also a whole bunch of other data and/or metadata.

The environmental agencies are corrupt pieces of shit.

Americans when they eat something that is not filled with 150 (imperial) tons of sugar…

Well, I guess I just used a „scam“ to pay for my VPN subscription. Later today, I will use another „scam“ to pay for my email service. Tomorrow I will use a „scam“ to pay for a VPS. Some day, I might use a „scam“ to rent a seedbox. So unfortunate that your so called „scam“ is actually usable to make payments online. In fact, those „scam“ payments are in some cases better, then‚ using a absolutely trustworthy credit card issued by a definitely trusted a reliable bank. Because banks never collapse and they never scam their customers. Such trustworthy multi-billion dollar corporations, I really don’t see a reason to distrust them. Depending on which “scam” you use, your payments are actually anonymous, just like cash. But the government and your bank don’t want you to use cash, because that way, they can’t track all of your transactions. They hand you a credit card, and they advertise it to you, and you actually start thinking that it is supposed to help you, while in reality it makes you a slave to the corporate and government-lead surveillance system. Fuck credit cards, fuck banks and payment providers, fuck central banks and governments. Use Monero and stay anonymous.

It’s not like it’s hard to make an account on another instance to look at piracy related content.

That’s right, but lemmy.world claims to be an instance for anyone, which it isn’t anymore. It’s not neutral anymore.

I can’t blame him for wanting to avoid legal issues before it gets to the point he is receiving notices, C&Ds and law suits. That can get very expensive, very fast.

It’s not like you immediately get sued, you first get a DMCA takedown notice. At that point, he could just defederate and everything would be fine.

Because that’s how the blockchain works. Without validation (which is what Mining does) anyone could just claim they have e.g. 1 million XMR when they have zero. Because you don’t have a central authority in crypto currencies, you need some other mechanism which verifies that transactions are legitimate. That mechanism is a whole bunch of complex math, or in other terms, Mining (in the context of crypto currency). Glad you like XMR though.

And your car steals all your personal information because it is part of a massive data mining operation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcu2YUCa0lA

Yeah, I don’t want to hate on lemmy.world for no reasons, but the things I described earlier turned that instance into a shit show pretty quickly. Which is unfortunate.

I get your point, you like the easy and convenient hosting that Cloudflare offers. I wouldn’t feel comfortable logging into a website that’s behind Cloudflare because they see everything. Including login credentials you submit. That’s why I try to avoid CDNs (not just Cloudflare) in general. Also, what really annoys me is how Cloudflare treats VPN and Tor users. You need to solve 5 million different restarted CAPTCHAs. This is in my opinion user-hostile. I don’t do anything bad, I am just a regular user looking to protect my privacy and not expose my true IP and location by using a VPN.