My experience with maintaining open source projects (though mine are very much smaller) is that it’s quite similar to a business: you just have to deal with stakeholders and people who think they are stakeholders.

I had all the same experience at work:

• Some unknown person from an unrelated team contacted me because something that my team does not manage broke. I tried to help a few times and I suddenly became their personal IT support team.

• Another time someone not even working at my company demanded that I drop everything and fix their problem, because my name appeared in 3rd parties libraries.

It’s sad that open source authors don’t always receive the recognition that they deserve.

Nice, set it as my phone’s wallpaper. Thank you.

I feel the same too.

I think the merging can be part of the federation process as well. Since I’m going to receive posts from the same server, it can combine these posts and give me back the combined view. There will be some kind of repost ID/link so that the server knows how to combine them.

I worked as software engineer and my boss tolerated me going to office at 2pm and leave at 9pm. It’s against company policy, certainly, but no one talked about it. It still is my most productive and happy time.