Apparently accounts-weibo, previously a core package maintained by MDG, no longer maintained (oauth accounts in Meteor guide). Why is that? Isn’t it a good idea to support a login provider that is used by a large share of Chinese users?
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Sure, but there are a lot that could be supported. It’s easy to publish your own on atmosphere and then you can make sure it stays updated etc.
Don’t get me wrong, but the last posts I’ve read where all about “solve it by yourself and make it available for the community”. If I take a look to the last 2 improvements (meteor-desktop and redis-oplog), there is no feedback from MDG. Why should people invest time into the community when MDG doesn’t care about it? It’s the job of MDG’s marketing department to make the community strong. But I can’t see much on this side, except that we hear “We will improve our communication”. Your CEO said months ago that he wants to be more active in the forum here. I don’t even remember his name?
Sure, but I’d much rather have it maintained by pros who also know when there are interesting changes in the related accounts packages etc 
And if I still do want the functionality, I may not go through the trouble of making and publishing a package for it.
Why is the only reason to invest time into a project if the core maintainers are going to do something about it? I would assume that these projects are worked on because that’s something the authors need.
If you have ideas about how we should promote a project like that then we’ll be happy to do it.
For example, I’d be happy to accept any posts about these projects on our blog.
Yes, but it’s not feasible for us to maintain accounts integrations for every popular social network out there. Specifically in the case of Weibo we ended up in a lot of situations where the integration was broken and nobody filed a bug or anything, so it was pretty hard to keep up.
I didn’t say that this is the only reason. Giving no feedback could mean that you don’t care. Every good organized company tries to motivate the community, especially if they extend their own product (in this case Meteor). [quote=“sashko, post:5, topic:31553”]
I would assume that these projects are worked on because that’s something the authors need.
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Let me take a quote of an answer from the meteor-desktop author:
Thank you all for a warm reception. I am really happy that you appreciate the developer experience as that is what I’ve been focusing on.
Mhh…I think a “Thank You” is a good feedback and shows that you appreciate the work of an author. And to be honest, who doesn’t want to hear some warm words if he created something interesting? Why there is no “Thank You” from MDG? You totally forgot how this appears to other people. In my case, it feels like “We don’t really care, we have other things to do”. And you as the only one active MDG member here should know, that there are some other people that feel the same way.
I’ve always received a thank you for any PRs to Meteor I’ve submitted.
We only have the ability to try out a small amount of packages that people build. Of course I could post a “thank you” but I feel that it would be empty if I haven’t personally used the tool, or looked into it in detail.
The thing that really bothers me though is that your post refers to Meteor as a “product”. It’s not a product. It’s an open source project. That’s something that, in theory, should benefit everyone participating and should give everyone a chance to make it into what they need. It’s not about cross-promotion or marketing.
We care to make sure that we don’t provide something broken to people. We care about making sure people have tools to be successful when interacting with the project. But treating other open source projects that are built on Meteor as an extension of a “product” doesn’t seem like a healthy attitude to me, and I think will just lead to more misunderstandings.
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I didn’t say they do it never, I’ve just showed 2 examples where they’ve showed no reaction and those authors really did a great job, especially the oplog thing is really a core issue.
For me it is also an open source project which I can use to build my own projects (I wouldn’t call my own projects as products, too). But I guess for MDG (as company) it is a product, because you’ve built it to build a business on it. We’re living in a commercial world, so I don’t think investors would give you money to make the world better. They want a ROI.
I’ve just posted my thoughts why some people may have a negative feeling on MDG and Meteor. That’s just the way I currently see Meteor. I develop all new projects with Meteor, so it’s normal for me that I take a look what’s going on there. And in the past time, I only read things like “Meteor is dead” - “Apollo will be their main business” - “There is only 1 developer maintaing Meteor” - “The community needs to do that if they want’s it”. And in my view this are warn signs for every new Meteor developer - and here I may miss a clear statement from MDG, because such postings are harmful for Meteor and MDG.
Maybe you’ve a different view because you are working there and know what’s going on - but hey, we don’t really know 
@erikmaarten @XTA do you have any ideas on how we can better promote community-driven improvements in the project? This is an area that could use work, so feedback on what channels would get the most visibility would help a lot.
On another note, part of the beauty of open source is the ability of community members to help maintain and promote aspects of the project that they care about most. Since we are a small team, we’re focusing our efforts on providing stability and key improvements for the core project while also enabling this community-driven effort on both the development and the evangelism side. We’re here to support the community with you resources, advice, and but can’t and shouldn’t be the single entity driving community engagement if the project is a healthy one. There’s lots to work on and improve, so keep letting us know what you’d like to see and how you think we can accomplish it together.
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Think this could be a little difficult, since Atmosphere should be the place for successful packages. In the case of meteor-desktop and redis-oplog, the Meteor Guide would be the place to be. At this point I’ve to agree that people who use such packages (like me) are responsible to extend the guide.
I agree. But here we also need a clear communication on MDG’s side. I don’t want invest time into something if I don’t know if it will still exists tomorrow. The best example is Blaze. About 6 months ago MDG announced that Blaze is still the way to go, just 2 months later it was removed from the core and given to the community. Now some people will say “It’s okay, the community will take control”, but on another view it is also “MDG don’t want invest money into dead things - so it is probably dead”. Then we had the MeteorPad discussion. The owner only said that MDG suddenly stopped paying bills - but we didn’t get any official statement from MDG. Just silence. That’s not the way how a company should handle it’s community. MDG needs to fix the communication issues first to get some trust back.
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Thanks for your perspective @XTA. Agree and hope you see progress on this front over the coming months.
I may have simply not been paying enough attention, but as far as I can see discussion about the development of Meteor has been held mostly behind closed doors. Take more of the discussions Meteor out in the open, don’t just announce what’s been decided already. The roadmap survey is a good start, though for some things like “What’s the single thing you’d most want to see in 2017?” it’s probably better to open a forum thread so people can see each others ideas and actually discuss the things suggested.
There are lots of other things that could improve. For ideas on how to develop a community around open source, read Producing Open-Source Software.
Perhaps I should mention that I’m very happy with Meteor overall, but if you want to improve the community around it there’s a bit of work to do.
Thanks for your perspective @erikmaarten. I was mostly asking which existing channels community members found to be the easiest to keep track of and follow.
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