@yaxu Rather a leap to label it as "customer-supplier", IMHO: I experience it more as "leaving things in the street" / "finding things in the street"

@yaxu
Sparks this thought.. In federated wiki, if somebody forks your page you know about it - the flag on your origin page displays a tag <Older/newer> showing where others are at with their usage of your source. This 'neighborhood' feature makes fedwiki an 'awareness engine'.

Doesn't the opensource world have equivalent machinery? Maybe an inventor might create a wiki page for any invention. And others could 'subscribe' by forking the page into their own wiki log of adoptions.

@yaxu I've heard plenty stories of authors getting mail from unknown people thanking them for their work. Mention ways of contacting you on your home page, we'll do the rest :) Thank you!

@yaxu Just recently, I was reading the foreword of a book from over a hundred years ago, in which the author was thanking everyone for their letters of appreciation for their previous books. And I couldn't help but think that with how "interconnected" and "social" everything is now, there should be more of that than ever, but it honestly feels like there's less.

@yaxu I tend to send an email sometimes to a support address if they have them to thank them, many say it made their Friday. :) And I also tip often when I use something regularly, both not often done indeed unfortunately.

@yaxu I never encountered this in the wild, but supposedly there used to be a genre of shareware called "postcard-ware" where to register you just sent a postcard to the developer. that was it. then the dev would put a pin in the map they hang up by their desk I guess?

I always thought that sounded cool.

@yaxu often i have wanted to tell people on GitHub that their software was great but there is no place to tell them unless i make an issue. It does seem like the whole paradigm is set to be so distant and transaction based

@yaxu It does seem uncommon to do that, though I've seen some libraries with lists of use-cases pointer to user projects.

@yaxu bring back “postcardware”!

@yaxu It's kind of standard behaviour in the open source game engine world - people tend to naturally form a community around the projects and show off what they've done. It's probably just a result of it being more visibly creative though?

@yaxu related: I just reviewed a paper which provided citations for all of the software tools, but none of the datasets that were used to validate their workflow. I found it to be an odd disconnect.

@yaxu I drive-by liked this toot yesterday. Today I came back to look it up and share it too. I intend to be the change I wish to see! Thank you.

Sometimes when I've done this in the past, I've imagined that the creators of successful projects would be too busy to care or acknowledge otherwise contentless thank-yous from users. But in practice, I have discerned no upper bound to the project size for which authors are gleefully grateful.