Mautic Community Gets Revamped, at last!

Many newcomers have expressed their astonishment and doubts about the Mautic community lately, in truth, we’ve all been a little worried about what was going on with the Mautic Community, the forums didn’t work for a long time, in fact, you couldn’t even register a new account on mautic.org at all!

Then there was the announcement about abandoning Slack in favor of Discord, but nothing did really happen afterward (it’s been several months)…
And then there were those, poking on the GitHub releases and versions, they noticed that Mautic 3, publicly announced almost a year ago to be completed before the end of 2018 or first quarter of 2019 at most, was completely stalled and there were no signs of any activity, at all.

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All that certainly painted a dark picture of what was going on in the Mautic community and if you were a newcomer to our community,  it even cast serious doubts about the future of this project. In fact, a few of the oldest community members have been asking me my opinion about “The future of Mautic” you don’t really ask these questions unless you have serious doubts…

I am also guilty myself, at some point, I had a chat with a few members of this community and I did ask about their opinion on “the future of Mautic”.

Since I try to keep an eye on everything going on in the Mautic community, I knew most of those issues were being dealt with, nonetheless, the lack of announcements, release dates… and in general, any information, worried me, but it was was the complete lack of any leadership what worried me the most. The existing activity looked to me as relatively random and too damn slow.

But my lack of trust in the community leadership goes far beyond the latest events… 

Who is the community? Who is the community leadership? What’s the role of Mautic Inc in the community, what’s the scope of the community and where are the lines that separate community and corporation (if any).
Is that important, is it relevant at all for us, the users? Oh yes, it is! Why?

Every time Mautic Inc’s priorities shift, the community suffers… because the community is managed exclusively by Mautic Inc’s employees, community members have little to no say in the internal operations of the community or its future. Not a very nice position to be in, especially since there are many capable community members already taking responsibility for most of the community heavy lifting.

But this is all going to change in the next weeks, Mautic is finally getting the powerful revamp it requires! or does it?

Not really!

– We already had a great and incredibly active forum before the community leaders decided to tear it down and convert tons of very good content into 404 pages.
– The existing mautic.org website does the job perfectly (provided you allow people to register).
– Slack is perfectly fine for 90% of us. The community really needs no replacement for Slack.

So basically, with all those new glittering changes we are getting now, we are basically, and finally, getting back where we were 3 years ago!!! just a little worse in fact…

A little worse because the move from Slack to Discord is going to be the next step in the downfall of the Mautic community. Since the forums were destroyed and the mautic.org website forbidden to newcomers, Slack has been the ONLY nexus the users could connect to get help, now that last connection is going to be severed, another blow to this community, designed by the community leaders and forced down the community’s throat by DB Hurley.

Which raises the question… why the fuck would anyone do that?

2 possibilities come to my mind:

a) They are stupid, careless, inept, incapable of running and growing an open source community.

b) It’s by design.
 

I try to be a pragmatic person, I tend to discard 99% of the chatter, the glitter, the magic and focus on facts, facts and their intersection with time. There are zero stupid people at Mautic Inc, none at all, so it’s obviously option b.