open-source

Florian Maas documents the public interactions among some of MkDocs' top contributors over the last 10 years and what leads to it's fragmented present. Lobster.rs, where I discovered this from, has some interesting discussions.

This led me to checking on httpx, created by the the same person as MkDocs, which has GitHub discussions and issues also disabled. This was one of the reasons-among a few other big ones-that promoted Michiel to fork the project.

In an effort to combat AI slop code reviews in open source projects Mitchell Hashimoto has created Vouch.

People must be vouched for before interacting with certain parts of a project (the exact parts are configurable to the project to enforce). People can also be explicitly denounced to block them from interacting with the project.

The tool is being tested in Ghostty and comes with CLI and GitHub action integrations. The tool generates and uses a "single flat file", so it's easily parsable.

This would allow projects to vouch or denounce users and share their lists with others.

Vouch lists can also form a web of trust. You can configure Vouch to read other project's lists of vouched or denounced users. This way, projects with shared values can share their trust decisions with each other and create a larger, more comprehensive web of trust across the ecosystem.

Terence Eden recently commented on GitHub's community discussion on the same AI slop issue. The suggestions there were around building a users reputation score around account age, labelling based on other GitHub user interactions and restricting contributions to assigned issues, among others. These were obviously centred around GitHub specific implementations unlike Vouch which would work across hosted git providers.

I discovered Vouch through Simon Willison's weblog.

Miniflux is an open source RSS reader, they describe themselves as "a minimalist and opinionated feed reader." What opionions you might ask? Well there's an entire page for that. I like this, I wish more open source projects clearly listed their design decisions, it helps filter through issues, feature requests and pull requests with a justification of why something is out of scope. I imagine this also would help deter some of those interactions from the beginning helping reduce the workload on larger active projects.