> While you might have access to the subculture, there is no obligation for anyone else to respond, collaborate or engage with random you.

true, but i think there's historically often been good-faith efforts to engage with newcomers in any field that requires intellectual or artistic curiosity or experimentation. what we're seeing played out is that this default good nature ignores the risk involved in growing a small garden beyond one's own property. there is a change in meta-social requirements at scale.

the extremes of this are super apparent in FOSS - one side of this being death-by-committee and overgovernance at the expense of the original project (requiring a support organization that outgrows the actual "work", for example, look at how many HNers view unions or internal policy committees), and the other side a harsh rejection of newcomers or calcification against new ideas at the expense of the long-term viability of a project. these issues can be imperceptible or not important in smaller projects.

but they're not limited to FOSS. i think these are probably fairly well-studied ideas in any form of organizations - business, social groups, churches, non-profits, unions, etc. i don't really know where to start to learn more about this or what the right approaches are (and i suspect they're often pretty unique to the group in question). i don't have an answer but i'm really interested in the huge grey area between fully-gatekept cultures and fully-open ones.