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Remember my Gen Z open source talk at #OSSummit? We published it on the @github blog because y'all haven't stopped talking about it since June 💭 Maintainers under 26 dropped from 25% to 10% since 2021. Meanwhile Gen Z is learning to code on YouTube and running Discord communities... 🧵

...but we're wondering why they don't stick around in our projects? Since June, so many of you started experimenting. Discord servers. Video docs. Purpose-first READMEs. This community continues to amaze me ✨

Blog: github.blog/open-source/... Real talk: what's one tradition in open source that might be pushing away younger contributors?

Good read, thanks! I completely agree with the goals, but I admit that I think the Discord advice has been a struggle for me. The projects I have seen use them seem to have really spamy activity. Either all questions and no answers, or actual spam posts.

The slack communities, despite slack being worse for community building IMO, have much higher "signal-to-noise" ratio. Is this something you have seen? If not, can you point me to some "good" examples? Specifically ones run by unpaid volunteers?

I think one thing that makes discord feel that way to me is the lack of threading. Slack means you can have side convos in a relatively sane way. Especially if you build a norm about using threads like that. Discord UX specifically pushes single thread per channel even if folks use replies AFAICT.