alt Hacker NewsOne pattern I've seen kill smaller open source projects that isn't mentioned: scope creep driven by the most vocal users.
A focused tool that does one thing well starts getting PRs and issues for tangential features. The maintainer, wanting to be responsive, merges them. Six months later the project is a Swiss army knife that's hard to maintain, hard to onboard new contributors to, and the original use case is buried under complexity.
The antidote is a clear CONTRIBUTING.md that says "here's what this project IS and ISN'T" and being comfortable closing issues with "out of scope, but would make a great separate project."
Easier said than done when you're a solo maintainer and every closed issue feels like you're letting someone down.
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It's even worse when you are telling the solo maintainer that this is where its going and they just keep accepting every minor contribution to make people happy and boost them if they can.
It's not a bad idea but it ends with just a huge mess of crap.
I've invested time working with a project like that and it's kind of heartbreaking to see it lose its way and become a total mess. It's tempting to fork and try and go back to its roots, but that has its own problems e.g. needing to invest a magnitude more time.
So much this. Everyone has their own idea of that the project should do and it's hard to explain that whilst that implementation is great for their specific use case, it's pretty shit for everyone else.
AI has just made this so much worse.
You also get people who dump a feature in a PR you don't particularly care about, then that submitter leaves and ages later people start reporting bugs or requests on the feature you didn't even want in the first place.