Yeah that’s a pain. I’ve also had Android kill Lemmy in the background while I went to my browser to check a spelling of a word… A draft feature would help too

When you say it becomes a need does this mean that not merging them would course the projects to fail?

Fail in what sense? It would definitely make consumer-minded people unsatisfied and most likely drive them away to another project/fork. For tech enthusiasts it would only do good (considering the contributions are enshitifying).

This means that if the option to merge the contribution didn’t exist in the first place (like non free software) the project would fail.

I’m probably missing what you’re trying to say, but since contributions come from companies, they would definitely be merged if the project was owned by the company making contributions.

Actual freedom is taking away peoples rights to make things worse. If you want an example of what happens when actual freedom is available look at the free market.

Strange to hear that while discussing free software but anyways freedom is not a static notion. Compared to feudal economy, free market is free, but it’s not free judging by our modern needs. And in fact it’s the exact thing I’m trying to go away from. Free, open and decentralised production I was talking about is its successor that breaks through the alienation and brings creative freedom to every individual.

Are you aware that software maintainers don’t have to merge the contributions these people are pushing?

Yes, I literally said that in the first line of the comment you’re replying to.

Are you saying that copyleft software is enshitififying because big companies are pushing too many (optional) contributions?

Yes. I’m not saying that always happens, but I do believe many projects enshitified a good amount because a lot of their contributors have become big companies. Or sometimes companies make an entirely new project that is enshitified from the very beginning but still gets included in other FOSS projects. Both merging a contribution or including a project are optional, but since FOSS projects get involved in this whole producer-customer relations model, where everything is done centrally by the developer and served ready-to-use to passive consumers, merging those contributions kinda becomes an actual need of users. So yeah, if you dig deeper, it’s ultimately the very involvement in this commercial centralised production model and not just companies, that causes enshitification, but I still think that letting companies just fuck off and do their own centralised thing separately from decentralised DIY-like development which, to my mind, is actual freedom, might help.

Okay maintainers don’t have to, but they usually end up doing so as those contributions are still valuable. The key point is that even though free software is called “free”, a huge chunk of it is going through the same process of “enshitification” as proprietary software, because of being developped by companies and being a part of this corporate, non-free world. So separating that from FOSS by letting companies keep their work by themselves seems to help a little bit.

There’s no direct relation, yes, but centralisation and bloating are both things commercial software development tends to because of the nature of developper-consumer relations. And GPL forces companies to contribute their code which is often based on those principles back to the original project. So I think there is indirect relation.

Well, for me personally the way the software is developped and designed is not something abstract. Centralisation and bloating, for example, makes understanding and developping software a significant amount more difficult which puts you in a more passive role and so making you much less free