The reason that an open source developer might experience burnout are myriad, but can include:

• Lack of compensation
• Insufficient tooling or project infrastructure
• A high ratio of operators to maintainers
• Lack of a concrete roadmap, quality documentation, tests, essential resources
• Lack of an onboarding process for new contributors
• Inability to reconcile differences with contributors, leading to hard forks or exodus of contributors
• Intractable architectural issues that require substantial engineering effort, possibly more than the maintainer can actually contribute

As someone who has done Community Management for an open source, decentralized communication platform (Diaspora), I am familiar with all of these things. This shit is hard, and I am not denying that Lemmy devs have done a lot of good work.

The problem is actually much simpler than you’re making it out to be. For a social platform, which depends on interconnected self-hosted communities to succeed, you absolutely have to build in the tools and utilities necessary to deal with all the crazy shit that comes with the territory. Ignoring this causes a cascade of problems that gradually get worse the longer they remain unaddressed.

The devs are surviving on crowdfunding and grants, and doing the best they can with that. That’s commendable! They probably need more of both to have their needs fully covered. But don’t get it twisted: receiving proceeds for your work is not the same thing as working for free.