It's no secret that open source maintenance has its dark sides, and one of these is having to sometimes interact with quite ungrateful, entitled or outright toxic people. As a project's popularity increases, so does the frequency of this kind of interaction, adding to the burden shouldered by maintainers and possibly becoming a significant risk factor for maintainer burnout.

I've been maintaining a quite popular project for over 12 years straight now, and had to develop the one or other coping strategy to deal with these interactions, in order to not let them drag me down and negatively affect my motivation and mental health. In this talk I want to first give a classification of the most common forms of bad and toxic behaviour I've seen in my day to day, and then share my personal approach to dealing with them, explaining why this has worked for me along the line.

In the end, the viewer should take away some concrete advice on how to handle possibly volatile interpersonal situations in the context of an open source project (and hopefully also beyond), without compromising on their own mental well-being.