Got trolled for building in public

For past 3 months, I have been working on open-source project Jina. In these 3 months, I have seen the best and the worst of Internet. Sharing these anecdotes so they serve as a lesson for everyone building in public and for the open-source community.

Anecdote 1 - May 2021

Just like every month, Max starts the public zoom meeting to host contributors of open-source project- Jina. 200+ people join in. Max starts sharing the big news about the upcoming major 2.0 release. He’s sharing this news publicly for the first time. Max’s eyes are brimming with excitement, it’s a major stepping stone for the project. We all have been coding, designing and planning for many months to reach here.

While Max is on the second slide of his presentation, loud music suddenly starts playing and Max’s voice fades away in the background. I hear the racist abuse in the music. I see a drawing being made up on the screen. Whoever is drawing that, is definitely not good at drawing but you can clearly understand that it looks like the private parts of a man.

This is the clip from the event where it happened WARNING! NSFW Content in the video.

We got zoombombed and that was embarrassing! In the meeting, there were people from diverse background and gender.

Building an open-source project is challenging on multiple fronts other than the core technical challenges:

• Understand what needs to be built and improved
• Help people understand the project
• Educate people about the domain
• Reach out to people who might benefit from your project
• Collaborate with other contributors
• Deal with issues and pull requests
• Deal with outdated versions/docs
• Deal with different opinions
• Sometimes deal with jerks like the ones who zoombombed us

The list is long! The point is

Open source is hard!

Making fun of someone’s work is easy!

Anecdote 2 - Jun 2021

After that zoombombing event, we did our best to not let trolls get in the way of our commitment to make this project successful and do that while being public and transparent about everything. But more than what we did, it is more about what community did for us. We were overwhelmed with the support.

Fast forward 1 month

• We doubled our growth
• We were trending #1 on Github (the #1 out of 190 million repositories)

Jina made first public appearance in April, 2020 and now it has reached to

• 6,000 stars on Github
• 524 forks
• 155 contributors
• 1839 PRs

A big thank you for this amazing support 🙏

My learning

This is not the first time I experienced trolling. I have learned three things

1. It’s common to get trolled on the internet, there’s nothing personal about that
2. The best answer to trolling is to ignore them and keep doing your best (easier said than done)
3. The open-source community is awesome. For every 1 troll you have 6,000 supporters.

Cheers to Jina contributors! Thank you for the support.

Trolling is a real issue that we all need to collectively deal with.

Conclusion

Build in public, trolls are temporary and you'll get more support than you asked for.

Having said that, I seek your opinion: When building in public, how can we make communities safer for people, specially for people from underrepresented backgrounds?