[fpc-other] Re Downward spiral

[HSN]

How many people actually use fpc/Lazarus ? I was told there were thousands and thousands of downloads. Does this mean that there are this many people using it? Or is it being downloaded for for other reasons? If it is the former, there should be no shortage of people around to participate in forums and chat. Is enough being done to make people aware of ways to be involved in the fpc community?

Fpc is an open source hobby project where people donate their time. Users of fpc should be encouraged to donate their time as well to help make the project better.

One of the ways that they can do this is by helping other users in real-time chat. I suspect that many people who use fpc/Lazarus are either unaware of irc real-time chat, have been chased away by people sabotaging it or have been discouraged from trying it by people who want this project to fail.

When I first started using Lazarus in 2015, it was my understanding there was chat support. The irc channel was very helpful and I learned a lot of things. I never imagined that the chat support would ever cease to exist. What is there to prevent the same thing from happening again to the forums or mailing lists? So far as I can tell , nothing at all. I’ve had questions go unanswered in the forums before, so support from forums is not guaranteed. There should be more options for support not less. I had to figure out how to solve the problem all by myself with no help whatsoever. People who are less fond of fpc would probably just get frustrated and leave.

This would not be the first time that an online community that I care about has disappeared. A chat channel is much like a canary in a coal mine. It is small element in the project and may to some people seem to not do anything useful and be irrelevant and frivolous. It easy for people who don’t need it to not care about it disappearing. I assure you there are people who need chat and most of them quietly leave rather than complain. It’s not a good idea to look the other way as parts of your community start to disappear, even if you don’t want to participate in them they still are still vital.

People using project are more likely listen to the advice of developers that announce where the chat channel is than someone whom they don’t know promoting a channel. I want to let you know thatNickolay is both a Lazarus developer and the owner of #fpc on Libera irc. Nicolay is well known in this community. Everyone who appreciates the work that he does should help support his channel whenever they have a chance and hopefully chat with him when he is online. There is also the #fpc-dev channel on Libera to meet at.

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