Actually, I think remote collaboration can work with the right medium and tools. For bcachefs, that's been IRC; we have an extremely active channel where we do a lot of collaborative debugging, design discussion, helping new users, etc.
I know a lot of people heavily use slack/discord these days, but personally I find the web interfaces way too busy. IRC all the way, for me.
But the problem of communicating effectively enough to produce a coherent design is very real - this goes back to Fred Brooks (Mythical Man Month). I think bcachefs turned out very well with the way the process has gone to date, and now that it's gotten bigger, with more distinct subsystems, I am very eagerly looking forward to the date when I can hand off ownership of some of those subsystems. Lately we've had some sharp developers getting involved - for the past several years it's been mainly users testing it (and some of them have gotten very good at debugging at this point).
I know a lot of people heavily use slack/discord these days, but personally I find the web interfaces way too busy. IRC all the way, for me.
But the problem of communicating effectively enough to produce a coherent design is very real - this goes back to Fred Brooks (Mythical Man Month). I think bcachefs turned out very well with the way the process has gone to date, and now that it's gotten bigger, with more distinct subsystems, I am very eagerly looking forward to the date when I can hand off ownership of some of those subsystems. Lately we've had some sharp developers getting involved - for the past several years it's been mainly users testing it (and some of them have gotten very good at debugging at this point).
So it's happening.