I feel one of the most important things for a thriving open source project is easy onboarding.

Statement of friendliness and similar are not that useful if I don’t know where to start to contribute to your project. A clean, up to date CONTRIBUTING file goes a long way, architecture documentation is extremely good, optimal is having an experience developer checking your patches and offering help.

Repositories that I contribute to the most helped me in the first phases of the journey, it was awesome, I gave back.

Just to be clear, it seems you apparently deleted the much downvoted posts you made here and on !foss@beehaw.org where you called for forking Lemmy because you claimed the maintainers were acting akin to tyrants. You said they were closing issues and rejecting PRs that users wanted to see because the maintainers themselves didn't want them. When asked for examples, the only examples you came up with were:

1. A weirdly annoyed contributor closing his own PR, followed by the maintainers of Lemmy fixing the PR themselves and merging it within days.
2. An issue open since 2020, where a maintainer commented that he didn't think it was a priority or a necessity, and when pinged about it again this year, made it very clear that he was open to a PR to add the requested functionality.

Do you still think Lemmy is run by tyrants? I find this post a bit jarring given the context of your previous one.

Open source isn't some special ordinance that makes a software project subject to any principles other than the ones outlined in its software license. The most basic principle being that someone wrote something which they thought could be useful for others and therefore published it under an open source license. If by releasing a piece of software I were strongly expected to adhere to any other principles like some of the ones you've suggested elsewhere, I wouldn't have released half of the stuff I have because I simply can't uphold these principles. Upholding them isn't free. It requires work which I don't have time for. I've already shared the work I was able to do by releasing as open source.

Edit:

I see a lot of confusion among what I assume is younger people who are relatively new to open source. Confusion as to open source being about freedom of choice, inclusion, democracy or what have you. It isn't. Some open source projects may be about one or more of those things. Many, even possibly most aren't. For example the Linux kernel is a hard dictatorship with Linus as top executioner. Convincing people of varying software engineering proficiency of why their favorite feature shouldn't happen or why their PR is garbage and will decrease the quality of the project in various ways takes way longer than closing the respective item. GNOME is famous for "Closed/Won't fix" with no explanation. Perhaps if open source developers were handsomely paid to spend the extra time to be nice, things could be different. Of course that implies that more developers must be paid to do the work since everything takes longer, or the pace of the project would be slower. Pick your priorities and pay for them appropriately.

Dude, please take this with all the kindness in the world, but to me it looks like you asked some questions yesterday about contributing to Lemmy, you got answers you didn't like, and now you're asking the exact same question in a much more indirect way in hopes of steering the conversation back to what you want to hear and how you like to look at it.

I and the other people who gave you answers before are trying to help you be more successful with your contributions. We're not trying to criticize or put you down or anything. I might be right or wrong about this or anything else, but I think it'd be to your benefit to slow down and really listen to what people are saying and how you can contribute in a good and productive give-and-take way, instead of just making your list of demands for how everyone else needs to be.

Or not. It's up to you; just that's my recommendation based on my limited knowledge of the situation.

I like KDE in how they approach new users. There are some people like Nate Graham investing so much time into talking to stupid bug reporters like me.

Having the first "start contributing" link be a Matrix Group is also nice, instead of some Git instance.

Change my mind, but I think Git* is horrible for collaboration if you use it exclusively

This post (and your comments here) read like a thinly veiled attempt to justify your existing beliefs rather than an honest attempt to acquire feedback.

I like curl's standard and trasparent release cycle. The consistent feature freeze before releases seems like a good idea to prevent bugs.

I'll humor you and give my input. If someone is making a FOSS project, get at least one person on your team with rudimentary social skills. Make them involved with support. Because as a simple user, "just use Discord" or "just use Linux" is not an answer to a tech problem, and it can sometimes be insulting to have the go-to people avoid answering the question

I would say good fund raising is often important, thunderbird and blender are good examples.