> but know that you're severely limiting the growth of your community and excluding people who could really contribute.
Quite the opposite. By not having the usual sources of annoyance and tedium Gleam's community has grown much faster and larger than similar technologies in the same space.
Being tolerant of abrasive behaviour has a cost to the technology project, and I'm not interested in paying it, especially not for ideological "everyone is welcome" reasons.
> Gleam's community has grown much faster and larger
I hope I’m the anecdotal exception then! I personally watched this exchange happen and left the community within 24 hours. I respect your right to run your community how you’d like, but I unfortunately didn’t experience any “good vibes” from how you handled this situation.
To me a good moderator handles situations without patronization or condescending, is respectful but clear, and doesn’t care how people feel about them.
You're occupying a very special niche (typed BEAM language), so if I were you I'd be wary of attributing your growth to your moderation practices. Correlation and causation and all that.
My prediction is that you grow rapidly because of natural interest in the niche you occupy. Your community will get larger and more diverse than you expect in spite of your efforts to keep people out. Then, when you run into your first major point of conflict about language development, the community will be divided on what to do and your efforts to moderate in this way will only fan the flames. Then Gleam will go the way of Elm—it will go back to being something that a very small niche group keeps using, but the bulk of the excitement will go back to Elixir as it slowly starts to occupy your technical niche.
A community with no mechanism for dealing with conflict cannot last long. If being an Elm sounds fine to you—it's not a bad fate after all—then that's fine! Just don't expect more unless you're willing to start developing conflict tolerance in the community.
I think you're misunderstanding here. We have very robust mechanisms for dealing with conflict and we have been successfully employing them for years. We have also consulted with moderators of much larger communities and very confident with how it is going.
Not sure what you mean about the Elm remark. They took the approach you're advocating for and have seen less success than we have financially and in terms of community growth metrics.
You must have missed when Elm was you [0]. They had far more excitement than you currently do and it lasted a few years.
And they didn't take the approach I'm advocating for (though they didn't take yours either). Their conflict management approach was "we do what Evan says". I'm not saying you're making their mistakes, I'm offering them as a cautionary tale—language success can be fleeting.
> We have very robust mechanisms for dealing with conflict and we have been successfully employing them for years.
If I'm understanding the approach correctly it's basically "we delete it". Feel free to elaborate if that's not what you meant.
> have seen less success than we have financially and in terms of community growth metrics.
You're barely starting to pick up speed, and there are so many ways left for you to fail. Much of your recent growth is due to Elixir starting to implement types but not having really arrived yet—sparking interest in the competitor who already has them. How long do you think you can ride that wave?
You've come off in this thread as rather arrogant and self assured, which are good traits for a lone wolf but dangerous traits for a community leader. I've been on the fence on whether to adopt Gleam, but I've honestly seen enough here to know that it's not worth investing the time right now. You may course correct and save the project, but the way you talk about your success as though it's something you achieved in the past through your own efforts doesn't make me think it's likely.
You've also likely seen enough of me to know that I'm not someone you'd want in your community, so I'm content at this point to part paths amicably.
I'm sorry but I don't think you're right here, I've not detected any increase in any Gleam growth metrics when Elixir type related things happen.
If anything we see Elixir have a bump when big things happen in the Gleam world, such as their GitHub start count increasing when Gleam v1 went viral.
I do agree though that we're only just picking up speed! Watch this space!
Quite the opposite. By not having the usual sources of annoyance and tedium Gleam's community has grown much faster and larger than similar technologies in the same space.
Being tolerant of abrasive behaviour has a cost to the technology project, and I'm not interested in paying it, especially not for ideological "everyone is welcome" reasons.