Not only Ubuntu Mate lacks contibutors, Xubuntu also needs contributors (their team is small and struggling and also have private life obligations) and of course Ubuntu Unity too.
Ogra told us yesterday on IRC that Ubuntu Mate always has been a one man show. The same counts for Ubuntu Unity, since i’ve been involved in the project for five years now as admin/moderator and tester, i can confirm that it was a one man show.
To be fair: Every (smaller) open source project lacks contributors. Hexchat for example was discontinued because it wasn’t maintained anymore and no one stepped up to do so.
What i have learned in the almost 19 years that i’m active in the linux world and been/being involved in various projects, is that people demand a lot (want changes, fixes, new features etc.). There’s also a group of people who like to help out but run away as fast as they came when they’ve been showed the way on where to look and how to start. And you never hear from them again.
As one project lead said a week or two ago on irc, the community isn’t what it used to be. I have to agree on that and we see it everywhere. It’s kinda sad that the interest, passion and dedication faded away. Probably they are spending too much time on social media (Insta, FB, X/Twitter, Reddit) on their devices posting toxic comments and nonsense instead of actually doing something useful. Why i say that? If you look at the IRC, Matrix, Telegram and Discord channels, they aren’t as active anymore as they were years ago.
One could argue about why Canonical doesn’t step up and help but we must not forget that the official Ubuntu flavors are all community driven projects and it’s up to the community to keep things going. Canonical provides the iso building part, repo’s and hosts the iso’s and we should be thankful for that.