I found @johnny's post above rather hurtful, and mostly because most of what he says above is true.

My initial reaction was anger. Maybe I should just block him, and then I'll never have to think about this shit again. But that didn't seem right, I don't want to add fuel to that fire.

So instead, I'm going to attempt to be completely honest.

I really enjoyed working on patchwork last year under the mantra of "make ssb work for me and my friends". It wasn't about being super slick, well tested or any of that. Just something that was nice to use. What changed was that thousands of people started to use it. And I have nothing against that, but once people started being given money to work on things that I see as a lot less important than client dev (which of course isn't necessarily true, but how I feel), I started to feel a bit left out. I tried to do the criteria for the first sameAs grant, but you know what, I FUCKING HATED IT.

So I suppose I could treat ssb-grant application like a job interview, where I have to sign my soul over to the needs of some abstract entity. But then I might as well just do that but for a real company.

Seriously, this is not fun. The proposal in this thread is as formal as I am happy to go with this process. If the community wants to fund that, I would be very happy. If not, I will be looking at other options:

• alternative funding
• forking patchwork out of ssbc, and doing it in my own space (invite only)
• giving up (or at least taking a very long break)

To address @johnny's suggestions for how real client development should be done.

[patchwork] should have died a long time ago, but because people use it for onboarding, it has outlived it's design; features added to "officially" supported clients need UX R&D so that they don't inadvertantly effect the next three years of onboardind, sharing, community building, w/e people should be using ssb to accomplish in their life

Sure, somebodyshould probably do that. Not me though. Sounds boring as hell. Grants aren't gonna get you that. You need a well resourced team, working full-time, otherwise folks are just gonna burn out.

I would love to see more people step up and make clients, but you know what, IT'S REALLY HARD. It takes up tonnes of time. Patchwork may be a steaming mess, but it works, and exists. ARGEDGE

</RANT>

Obviously this post was written in the heat moment, so apologies that it makes very little logical sense. But I'm sick keeping this shit bottled up, so here it is. I love ssb, and (mostly) everyone here! I want to discuss this in the most productive way possible, but I am getting a little bit pissed off. Money changes things.