I open source all of my projects. Most people I encounter are reasonably polite, but of course even my most popular is used by a tiny fraction of the number of Gnome users. In any case, I long ago stopped caring about being beholden to users. Often they’re doing me favors and finding issues I haven’t, and some even provide useful analysis that saves me work. A few provide contributions. But at the end of the day, I do what I do for me, and anyone else who benefits from it provides a small dose of dopamine from being useful.

I regularly fork projects and implement changes I want; I also file PRs, but in the case the upstream author has different opinions about it, requiring work I don’t think it’s necessary, I just let it go and maintain my own fork.

This is not Ideal Open Software Development, with many people contributing to a common goal. It’s fractured and selfish. But the other way, it becomes work, and nobody’s paying me for this, and so I give no fucks.

My mental health improved drastically once I stopped emotionally caring about the opinions of my users. I still care about the technicalities, but only insofar as they affect me or I deem them to be a superior solution. Key to this is not engaging emotionally; if I’m not interested in working on it, I just say so: I have other priorities, but an happy to review and maybe accept PRs.