@gnusocialjp @alex
> What do you and pleroma user think about @alex 's article?
I learned the hard way that western open source development teams always get caught up in drama sooner or later, it's nothing new.
Not like with Japanese development teams where we're mostly on the same grounds or avoid conflict if we have a different opinion, in the west (欧米) it's enough to have a difference in political opinion to cause a loud break up.
> I think alex has no illegal act and criminal act (including hate speech).
Being able to have hate speech is part of having free speech.
If you can't say anything bad, speech is limited.
However, LGBT people are well known for being particularly soft.
Even saying "there are only 2 genders" or "men have a penis" is considered "hate speech" to them.
But from what I understood, Alex wasn't fighting, it was the other side kicking him out.
@alex, @xianc78, @PhenomX6, can you maybe give more insight?
(If you explain, please use proper English, I don't think GNU social JP's English is at the level to understand slangs or altered terms.)
> What do you and pleroma user think about @alex 's article?
I learned the hard way that western open source development teams always get caught up in drama sooner or later, it's nothing new.
Not like with Japanese development teams where we're mostly on the same grounds or avoid conflict if we have a different opinion, in the west (欧米) it's enough to have a difference in political opinion to cause a loud break up.
> I think alex has no illegal act and criminal act (including hate speech).
Being able to have hate speech is part of having free speech.
If you can't say anything bad, speech is limited.
However, LGBT people are well known for being particularly soft.
Even saying "there are only 2 genders" or "men have a penis" is considered "hate speech" to them.
But from what I understood, Alex wasn't fighting, it was the other side kicking him out.
@alex, @xianc78, @PhenomX6, can you maybe give more insight?
(If you explain, please use proper English, I don't think GNU social JP's English is at the level to understand slangs or altered terms.)
@ryo @xianc78 @alex @gnusocialjp I can explain why this is such a big deal to some people and why the Western FOSS community is full of drama (within the past few years). It's a long essay, but it takes a lot to understand why it got to this.
Originally the FOSS community (free and open source) wasn't too bad drama wise for multiple reasons. Everyone had a common enemy (Microsoft + proprietary software vendors), and nobody really had conflicting motivations. Everyone also seemed to be on a similar page regarding political views, with everyone seemingly sharing the same mix of left wing politics and libertarianism. Most notably political stuff at most would have been a website message or sending pity sob story emails to anyone doing an xscreensaver port to Windows, only to complain when someone sent him gay porn.
This came to a crashing halt for a few reasons. In the mid-2010s there was "Donglegate", in which some woman cried about a man making a dongle joke at a Python conference and got him fired, which backfired and got her fired too since this was the early 2010s and corporations wouldn't yet shield problem employees who were loyal to the cause. There was also Eich's ouster from Mozilla, and ESR made a famous post alleging that the "women in tech" crowd had come for Linus Torvalds, and said post would gain traction again when Linus made the infamous break post and said that he was using Coraline Ada's code of conduct.
Also in the mid 2010s, three things happened in America. The first is that gay marriage was legalized and the lobby turned towards transgender pet causes (solidified when Bruce Jenner came out as trans and the only mockery allowed was if you were shitting on him for not being left-wing, any "haha this Olympic medalist became a woman" jokes were banned). The second thing that happened is that the social media machine began to lose control of the narrative and topics for the first time, with one event known as "GamerGate" resulting in two divided sides online fighting. GamerGate was an event where some e-celebrity was caught having an affair with game journalists, and the media tried extremely hard to cover it up resulting in pushback. This scared the media and many in the tech industry to the core because everyone was supposed to "listen and believe". Yet had they just let it slide and ignored it, nobody would care about this years later. The actual events of this are nowhere near as important as the end result of this, which is that this entire thing split nerds into two camps: you were either for GamerGate (or right wing politics) and saw it as an attempt to reform a dying industry or you were against it and saw it as an attempt to harass women online.
The third thing that happened was that Donald Trump won the 2016 election, which wasn't supposed to happen, resulting in a repeat of GamerGate across American politics. If GamerGate was polarizing, Donald Trump winning activated a killswitch across tons and tons of nerds (and also celebrities, failed artists, and news people) at once. Suddenly, Donald Trump was literally Hitler 2 and was going to send all of the LGBT to the camps. Twitter and the media were flooded with nonstop lies and still are to this day about Trump, and they won't be happy until he is assassinated or in prison.
Also coincidentally, this is when the transgender craze began to spread like wildfire online but especially among two groups: easily influenced broken teens and nerds. This was fueled both by media coverage/promotion, offering an identity for those who lacked one, and the fact you can easily obtain HRT illegally without a prescription by ordering it online discreetly. This community became notorious for both telling everyone they meet that they're really a man who wants you to play along with his delusions of being a woman, wanting to be the most oppressed minority, treating the transgender flag as a fashion symbol or streetwear brand, and making sure to derail every conversation to only talk about transgender issues if the topic comes up. It also became a red flag if any user were to have 🏳️⚧️ in their bio or username as any user with such would be prone to irrational behavior, I mean that community does nickname their drug binges a "second puberty" after all. While many talk about trannies entering the community from outside, in reality many had a big online footprint within the tech community under a male name.
So what does any of this have to do with free and open source software, and the Alex drama? Simple. As a result of Trump and whatever the latest thing the media is talking about (be it the war in Ukraine, trans rights, some terrorist attack/shooting, some illegal protest being framed as a terrorist attack, some high profile fake suicide, and more) anything and everything has to be a political soapbox for left wing politics. In the software community, it has become extremely common to use software as a soapbox for issues as well. Some no-name developers would re-license their software under restrictive licenses that had clauses saying that you couldn't use this if you worked for someone he/she hated. There were a few NPM developers sabotaging their code to protest being broke and whatnot. More developers than I can count also sabotaged products if you had a Russian IP with one trying to nuke hard disks and others just halting updates.
The other thing is that thanks to how political the FOSS community is, you also have to be up to date with whatever the current trends are. Bitcoin was the coolest thing in that community 10 years ago, but because some media website said that it was killing the planet and political dissidents use it, you must not use it. Don't get me started on how every single one of them wants to bury their views on lolicon from 10 years ago, or how free speech was their thing.
Then there's how the LGBT community treats others online. Put it this way: that community doesn't just have thin skin if you accidentally use the wrong pronouns, it is now considered a hate crime in many western countries to do this deliberately. Unfortunately dictating what people can say about you goes against free speech, so their free speech activism had to go too. The thing is, they want free speech for themselves.
Which is what happened to Alex. Alex was allowed to get harassed by the other Pleroma developers, but he was not allowed to call them out for it. Alex was ruining Pleroma for Soapbox-FE according to them, but as he pointed out Pleroma had modifications to interoperate with Misskey, a software with less users than Soapbox. Why did it have those? Because according to Alex, the top instances that run Soapbox and Alex have political views and in many cases aesthetics that aren't trendy with the Pleroma developers, but the instances running Misskey had aesthetics and political views that were. Developers were running smear pieces on Alex on their website, but how dare you call them out for doing the same thing.
All of this was because he was against a pet cause that somehow has become the biggest cultural issue of the last decade over here to the point many people are against it but won't say it in fear of losing their jobs.
Originally the FOSS community (free and open source) wasn't too bad drama wise for multiple reasons. Everyone had a common enemy (Microsoft + proprietary software vendors), and nobody really had conflicting motivations. Everyone also seemed to be on a similar page regarding political views, with everyone seemingly sharing the same mix of left wing politics and libertarianism. Most notably political stuff at most would have been a website message or sending pity sob story emails to anyone doing an xscreensaver port to Windows, only to complain when someone sent him gay porn.
This came to a crashing halt for a few reasons. In the mid-2010s there was "Donglegate", in which some woman cried about a man making a dongle joke at a Python conference and got him fired, which backfired and got her fired too since this was the early 2010s and corporations wouldn't yet shield problem employees who were loyal to the cause. There was also Eich's ouster from Mozilla, and ESR made a famous post alleging that the "women in tech" crowd had come for Linus Torvalds, and said post would gain traction again when Linus made the infamous break post and said that he was using Coraline Ada's code of conduct.
Also in the mid 2010s, three things happened in America. The first is that gay marriage was legalized and the lobby turned towards transgender pet causes (solidified when Bruce Jenner came out as trans and the only mockery allowed was if you were shitting on him for not being left-wing, any "haha this Olympic medalist became a woman" jokes were banned). The second thing that happened is that the social media machine began to lose control of the narrative and topics for the first time, with one event known as "GamerGate" resulting in two divided sides online fighting. GamerGate was an event where some e-celebrity was caught having an affair with game journalists, and the media tried extremely hard to cover it up resulting in pushback. This scared the media and many in the tech industry to the core because everyone was supposed to "listen and believe". Yet had they just let it slide and ignored it, nobody would care about this years later. The actual events of this are nowhere near as important as the end result of this, which is that this entire thing split nerds into two camps: you were either for GamerGate (or right wing politics) and saw it as an attempt to reform a dying industry or you were against it and saw it as an attempt to harass women online.
The third thing that happened was that Donald Trump won the 2016 election, which wasn't supposed to happen, resulting in a repeat of GamerGate across American politics. If GamerGate was polarizing, Donald Trump winning activated a killswitch across tons and tons of nerds (and also celebrities, failed artists, and news people) at once. Suddenly, Donald Trump was literally Hitler 2 and was going to send all of the LGBT to the camps. Twitter and the media were flooded with nonstop lies and still are to this day about Trump, and they won't be happy until he is assassinated or in prison.
Also coincidentally, this is when the transgender craze began to spread like wildfire online but especially among two groups: easily influenced broken teens and nerds. This was fueled both by media coverage/promotion, offering an identity for those who lacked one, and the fact you can easily obtain HRT illegally without a prescription by ordering it online discreetly. This community became notorious for both telling everyone they meet that they're really a man who wants you to play along with his delusions of being a woman, wanting to be the most oppressed minority, treating the transgender flag as a fashion symbol or streetwear brand, and making sure to derail every conversation to only talk about transgender issues if the topic comes up. It also became a red flag if any user were to have 🏳️⚧️ in their bio or username as any user with such would be prone to irrational behavior, I mean that community does nickname their drug binges a "second puberty" after all. While many talk about trannies entering the community from outside, in reality many had a big online footprint within the tech community under a male name.
So what does any of this have to do with free and open source software, and the Alex drama? Simple. As a result of Trump and whatever the latest thing the media is talking about (be it the war in Ukraine, trans rights, some terrorist attack/shooting, some illegal protest being framed as a terrorist attack, some high profile fake suicide, and more) anything and everything has to be a political soapbox for left wing politics. In the software community, it has become extremely common to use software as a soapbox for issues as well. Some no-name developers would re-license their software under restrictive licenses that had clauses saying that you couldn't use this if you worked for someone he/she hated. There were a few NPM developers sabotaging their code to protest being broke and whatnot. More developers than I can count also sabotaged products if you had a Russian IP with one trying to nuke hard disks and others just halting updates.
The other thing is that thanks to how political the FOSS community is, you also have to be up to date with whatever the current trends are. Bitcoin was the coolest thing in that community 10 years ago, but because some media website said that it was killing the planet and political dissidents use it, you must not use it. Don't get me started on how every single one of them wants to bury their views on lolicon from 10 years ago, or how free speech was their thing.
Then there's how the LGBT community treats others online. Put it this way: that community doesn't just have thin skin if you accidentally use the wrong pronouns, it is now considered a hate crime in many western countries to do this deliberately. Unfortunately dictating what people can say about you goes against free speech, so their free speech activism had to go too. The thing is, they want free speech for themselves.
Which is what happened to Alex. Alex was allowed to get harassed by the other Pleroma developers, but he was not allowed to call them out for it. Alex was ruining Pleroma for Soapbox-FE according to them, but as he pointed out Pleroma had modifications to interoperate with Misskey, a software with less users than Soapbox. Why did it have those? Because according to Alex, the top instances that run Soapbox and Alex have political views and in many cases aesthetics that aren't trendy with the Pleroma developers, but the instances running Misskey had aesthetics and political views that were. Developers were running smear pieces on Alex on their website, but how dare you call them out for doing the same thing.
All of this was because he was against a pet cause that somehow has become the biggest cultural issue of the last decade over here to the point many people are against it but won't say it in fear of losing their jobs.
@PhenomX6 @xianc78 @alex @gnusocialjp @ryo did you shit out this wall of text just to misrepresent what happened? alex violated the established process of introducing new changes into the codebase, that’s all, he was stripped off maintainer rights because of that and started sperging about trannies and fags
@pomstan @PhenomX6 @xianc78 @alex @gnusocialjp I'm listening to the interview GNU Social JP linked to in his blog post, the only "violation" I could get out of it is that he doesn't like that the default is that all Fedi instances are widely open to everyone so that the ultra sensitive will use blocklists to cut off entire instances for having opinions they don't like, and instead wants to have a model where you don't federate with anyone by default, and then you whitelist the instances you want to federate with.
In the sense of maintaining healthy communities it makes a lot of sense, but for exposure purposes it means you'll need to actually find these instances first.
In the sense of maintaining healthy communities it makes a lot of sense, but for exposure purposes it means you'll need to actually find these instances first.
@ryo @PhenomX6 @xianc78 @alex @gnusocialjp i dunno about any interviews, he steamrolled quote posts into the master without discussing it with other maintainers or thinking how they will impact non-supporting instances
instead wants to have a model where you don’t federate with anyone by default, and then you whitelist the instances you want to federate with.
that’s the expected level of retardation and anti-community mindset from a former gab and current poast developer. both don’t need a fediverse but need a second twitter where they are in control
@pomstan @PhenomX6 @xianc78 @alex @gnusocialjp No, because Gab defederated and stayed that way.
And Poast just lies about who they defederate.
The idea I can agree with is that you can have a community of friendly instances.
So the auth-left have their echo chamber, the auth-right have their echo chamber, the libertarians have an own space with without authoritarian lunatics interfering, the centrists can choose whichever side they want to federate with.
This completely eliminates the possibilities of hostile takeovers by wokies which we've all witnessed with big tech, the gaming and comic industries, the loycaloyzers, and so on.
Though I didn't say it should be the only way, which is what I'd disagree with on Alex's take.
There are cases where you want to have federation with everyone by default, which is why choice of software you want to use needs to be available.
For example, want an open door policy? Install Fedi software X.
Want a private and invite-only community? Install Fedi software Y.
Want both? Install both on 2 different servers or 1 server under different domain names.
And Poast just lies about who they defederate.
The idea I can agree with is that you can have a community of friendly instances.
So the auth-left have their echo chamber, the auth-right have their echo chamber, the libertarians have an own space with without authoritarian lunatics interfering, the centrists can choose whichever side they want to federate with.
This completely eliminates the possibilities of hostile takeovers by wokies which we've all witnessed with big tech, the gaming and comic industries, the loycaloyzers, and so on.
Though I didn't say it should be the only way, which is what I'd disagree with on Alex's take.
There are cases where you want to have federation with everyone by default, which is why choice of software you want to use needs to be available.
For example, want an open door policy? Install Fedi software X.
Want a private and invite-only community? Install Fedi software Y.
Want both? Install both on 2 different servers or 1 server under different domain names.
@ryo @PhenomX6 @xianc78 @alex @gnusocialjp echo chambers are traditionally considered a sin in the West because they prevent evolution of ideas
@pomstan @PhenomX6 @xianc78 @alex @gnusocialjp Authoritarians hate evolution of ideas, they only want to have full control over their already established, fixed ideas.
So give the authoritarians the echo chambers they want, so that libertarians can contribute to a freer and more reasonable society without commies/soycialists/fascists (auth-left) and/or neonazi's/religious boomers (auth-right) getting in the way.
So give the authoritarians the echo chambers they want, so that libertarians can contribute to a freer and more reasonable society without commies/soycialists/fascists (auth-left) and/or neonazi's/religious boomers (auth-right) getting in the way.
@pomstan @PhenomX6 @alex @gnusocialjp @xianc78 Actually, we technically already have such containment boards.
For example, Mastodong.soycial and Disqordia for the authoritarian left, Gab and Poast for the authoritarian right, 076 SNS, Baraag, Pawoo, and Game Liberty for libertarians.
The auth-left ones niggerlists all the instances that don't align with their political believes the auth-right ones either niggerlists all instances that don't align with their political believes or don't federate at all to begin with, and the libertarian ones (I mean the real ones, not those that claim to be such, and then maintain a 900 zillion pixel high niggerlist) don't block anyone (or just a few because of spam or bots), and in many cases have an "each user decides for him or herself individually who they want to follow or not" policy.
For example, Mastodong.soycial and Disqordia for the authoritarian left, Gab and Poast for the authoritarian right, 076 SNS, Baraag, Pawoo, and Game Liberty for libertarians.
The auth-left ones niggerlists all the instances that don't align with their political believes the auth-right ones either niggerlists all instances that don't align with their political believes or don't federate at all to begin with, and the libertarian ones (I mean the real ones, not those that claim to be such, and then maintain a 900 zillion pixel high niggerlist) don't block anyone (or just a few because of spam or bots), and in many cases have an "each user decides for him or herself individually who they want to follow or not" policy.
@ryo @PhenomX6 @xianc78 @alex @gnusocialjp so how do single user instances get into federation?
@ryo @PhenomX6 @xianc78 @alex @gnusocialjp i’ve read them all. if federation is whitelisted by default, how do single user instances start federating?
@pomstan @PhenomX6 @xianc78 @alex @gnusocialjp Either they reach out to instances they want to federate with, or other instances reach out to them.
This is kind of how Pleroma is already, as the public timeline is empty by default, and fills up as you start following or get followed by users of other instances.
Likewise, PeerTube is another example of that; the admin must follow another instance first in order to retrieve content from other PeerTube instances.
This is kind of how Pleroma is already, as the public timeline is empty by default, and fills up as you start following or get followed by users of other instances.
Likewise, PeerTube is another example of that; the admin must follow another instance first in order to retrieve content from other PeerTube instances.
Follow
@ryo @PhenomX6 @xianc78 @alex @gnusocialjp @pomstan Manually adding every instance isn't very viable unless there is just a small number of big one's, even if you somehow learn about them
People will notice that hosting their own instance will make nobody talk to them, so they join a big one instead, and then that makes the problem worse
Why can't people read the full context anymore in current year?