It seems that community contributions to Element Web (Matrix client) are often effectively rejected. For example, see:
- https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/9240
- https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/11078
There are also many other PRs for Element Web/Desktop which have not gotten a review in a timely manner (see here). The request to improve the terrible notification sound has been there since 2017, and though several PRs have been submitted to improve it, they have been either ignored or rejected for an unknown reason (there should be an epic project going on which should make the six-year-wait legitimate).
When it comes to development of Element, there is a lot of unspoken, unwritten, internally shared rules among the internal team members. Your PR will be effectively rejected even if it works, unless it aligns with their goals, which you cannot know before submitting a PR.
It should be well noted that there is a clear and strict division between the internal paid workers and external volunteer developers who essentially provide the team free labor. The exclusive attitude of the team behind Element has discouraged the latter from contributing to the project. I myself have been one of the active localization volunteers, but I stopped contributing after I realized it has been free labor.
Not sure if Syphon rejects community contributions but I wish Syphon client got more love and attention. Syphon is more privacy focused and is written in Dart, allowing it to be compiled for desktop and mobile.
If i learned anything from my early contributions, it’s checking the health of a project and attitude of its maintainers before spending anytime on that project.
Yes, I should have done that actually.
Unfortunately I don’t think your experience is unique. I’ve seen several open source projects suffer from cliquey, protectionist behavior. I’ve been on a project where I was told by the primary developer to rebase my PR branch onto origin/main or it won’t get looked at. By the time I’ve done that, that same developer’s already pushed a commit directly to origin/main, and I’m no longer up-to-date.
Firstly, I agree this is very shitty behaviour reminiscent of what a soon to be for profit company would do. See: Hashicorp Terraform.
But I’ve got to caution anyone against throwing in unsolicited pull requests. If the maintainers don’t know about it they’ll be upset. That being said the pull requests posted seem totally solicited and in fact led on by people before subsequently being torpedoed.
To me it shows well that the company thinks little of the importance of the communication between internal team members and external volunteers.
If you guys are by any chance interested in how members of the community responded, please check out the comments added after the PR was closed: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/9240#issuecomment-1703060227 and below. You would be able to see the pent-up negativity toward the reluctant team communication. Check these two:
I once went into the Element support chat asking if it was possible to change my user name color, as I’m pretty closely identified to this username, and I despise the lime green it creates in that client. They said no, and typically I would expect to then be told, “but you can open a ticket in our tracker” or etc. Instead I was told, “use a different client if you want to change your username color (locally).”
Very weird experience.
Obviously there is a mistrust of the team toward the community, which makes them regard asking a question as attacking their product.
