Comment by account42

> I’m a young(-ish) dev who used to care a lot about open source but never managed to break into a community.

I think this is the wrong mindset. Open source works best with a "hacker" approach where you fix your own issues / fulfill your own wants and then share the results with others. Sure, this could result in becoming part of a community but that shouldn't be the goal.

> “Your patch works and provides a feature some people might like, but I don’t like it, go away.”

That's an entirely reasonable response. You are effectively asking the project regulars to maintain your code going forward, after expending whatever effort it would take to coach you into making it fit. It's perfectly fine for them to say thanks, but no thanks. Accepting pull requests indiscriminately only leads to project death by scope creep, unmaintanable bloat and eventually maintainer burnout.

> I’ve donated plenty to organizations like Mozilla, Wikipedia, and GNOME. I then email them with my opinions on what they’re doing. In nearly every case not only am I ignored completely, I see those projects (Mozilla especially) continue to drift in a direction that I disagree with. So, I stopped donating.

Understandable and I feel similarly about these (well except I never cared much about GNOME) but they are all run closer to startups than open source community projects.