The maintainer of a popular Rust project quit this morning and took down the project. Buried in the post mortem:

Be a maintainer of large open source project is not a fun task. You alway face with rude and hate, everyone knows better how to build software, nobody wants to do home work and read docs and think a bit and very few provide any help.

If you maintain something that gets popular this is bound to happen. I appreciate that the CNCF requires maintainers from multiple organizations to graduate. This means the burnout of one person or organization isn't going to take down a project.

But, this doesn't do much for the mental health of the maintainers on the projects. Incubating and sandbox projects don't need to have multi-org maintainers so there is still risk. But, where is the CNCF support system to help them build more maintainers and deal with the stress that comes along with being popular? The stress isn't just expectations others put on us. We sometimes put it on ourselves.

With that in mind, can we start to build out a support system. I would suggest starting with a mailing list that's maintainers only. A place where we maintainers can talk about things in private. Seek help, share ideas, get advice from others going through it, and so forth. For some projects that overlap in space this would need to be done in the spirit of coopetition.

Thoughts?

- Matt Farina