My personal idea of what open source software is, is that it is mainly it’s community. The software is nothing without it’s community, contributors and users alike.
So building a healthy, constructive, helpful, and welcoming community is the main goal. And one part of maintaining a sustainable community is new members. Why? Well people die, find other hobbies, leave for other priorities and so forth. So any long term healthy community needs an influx of new users to compensate for its natural loss of members. And remember that only a fraction of people trying the software become users and only a fraction of users report bugs and only a fraction of bug reports become developers and only a fraction of developers become long term committed developers…
(I’m essentially copy pasting this mind set from other community driven areas of my life. Mainly being an active Lindy Hop dancer/instructor and always pushing for the extreme importance of prioritizing beginners. A dance community quickly fades away into emptiness without new dancers).
Keywords: healthy, constructive, helpful, and welcoming.