I am not native english so maybe it's just me, but I think the title is misleading because it suggests that Debian could be struggling with a situation where developers would massively drift away (my first reaction was "what ?? is there really a significant amount of devs that are leaving Debian now, and why ?"), while actually it's more a discussion on how to bring awareness to a team and encourage developers to better communicate with colleagues when they have a life change that would lower their commitment (which can happen to anyone, and in any project), so that the project can better handle when a developer "drifts away".

When Debian is making decisions to abandon social media accounts which give them reach outside of their own bubble from the 90s consisting of mailing lists and irc it is hard to see there be a sustainable future for the project.

Letting Claude summarize my thoughts for me on this:

Genuine respect to anyone doing thankless package maintenance for free. But maybe the real problem isn't that Debian volunteers go quiet — it's that we have 100 distros on DistroWatch and half of them are the same thing with a different wallpaper?

Debian's Data Protection Team was established back in 2018 for dealing with European data protection legislation like the GDPR.

perhaps nobody would waste their life volunteering on such crockery. this is not a task for a developer but a mindless apparatchik