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Discussions on Hyprland, Community Moderation, and Transphobia

Arnox

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For some quick background, Hyprland is a relatively new Wayland tiling compositor that's making a splash in the Linux community. People generally like the software but apparently there's been an incident or two in the Hyprland community (specifically in the project's Discord server) where a transgender individual was constantly misgendered as "he" due to people there assuming by default, as is internet tradition, they were a guy. This soon escalated as, when the person put their pronouns into their server nickname, a moderator changed them to "(who/cares)". As you can imagine, this caused some ire in the Linux community. A github issue was created to make a code of conduct for the Hyprland community. Such was met with some derision by the chief maintainer, vaxerski, and was closed.

Alright, so what can we learn from this? Well, on one hand, is this chief maintainer the transphobic far-right Hitler-supporting person some of the Linux community is making him out to be? No, not even close. Was the transgender person in question booted out of community by a moderator or silenced? No.

But is the Hyprland community in general still acting rather immature... ? Yeah, I'd say so. At this point, this isn't necessarily a question of transphobia nearly so much as it is a question of professionalism. Sure you can say that all that matters is code contributions and code quality, but if you present yourself as an immature 16-year-old, people are generally less likely to want to trust you with their code or even interact with you. It's much the same thing as hiring someone. Sure, someone can be an absolute genius, but if they're a total cunt to be around, then they're going to drag the whole team down, so it's not worth hiring them.

I'm not exactly innocent in this though. Long ago, I used to have a lackadaisical attitude towards moderation. I was young and dumb. And because of that, I made a fair few mistakes in handling my community.

As to the issue of not having a code of conduct, while I actually do agree with making one, the author doesn't have to make it overly strict whatsoever. There is no government law that demands that CoCs must be incredibly restrictive. There just should be SOMETHING which tells people what they should expect in the Hyprland community. That's all. Ironically, I think if there was, the chief maintainer could probably have headed all this drama off at the pass and they could be off writing and checking more code instead of dealing with all this.
 
But is the Hyprland community in general still acting rather immature... ? Yeah, I'd say so. At this point, this isn't necessarily a question of transphobia nearly so much as it is a question of professionalism. Sure you can say that all that matters is code contributions and code quality, but if you present yourself as an immature 16-year-old, people are generally less likely to want to trust you with their code or even interact with you.

Who's acting immature, and who's being professional here? I would think that the person insisting on special treatment is acting immature, and person ignoring the narcissist is being professional.

In general, I think it's wrong to think of code projects as "communities", and it's wrong to create a community based on a code project. There are people who contribute to a project and people who do not. If you don't like how things are managed, you can fork it and manage it yourself. There does not need to be personalities, or names, or friendships. It is not a social network, nor should it be. If you make a social network out of it, you're just distracting from the project. Any communication should directly serve the project.

So I disagree that there should be a CoC, because a github project never needs one. One shouldn't care if Adolf Zelenskyy Hitler himself makes a pull request, only that his code works.
 
Delusional people shouldn't be dictating terms, demand respect, or even be writing code. They probably wanted Coraline Ada's Contributor Covenant in all its slippery slope.
 
Sorry for the long wait between replies.

Who's acting immature, and who's being professional here?

While we don't know what the trans person said or did exactly (to my knowledge), as an administrator, it is one's inherent duty to be above pettiness. What's that old saying... "You wanna be a gangster, you gotta do gangster shit." Well, here, it's the same, "You wanna be a professional, then you gotta do professional shit," and that includes not acting immature yourself when someone who's immature enters your Discord and starts being irritating.

In general, I think it's wrong to think of code projects as "communities", and it's wrong to create a community based on a code project. There are people who contribute to a project and people who do not. If you don't like how things are managed, you can fork it and manage it yourself. There does not need to be personalities, or names, or friendships. It is not a social network, nor should it be. If you make a social network out of it, you're just distracting from the project. Any communication should directly serve the project.

Well, yeah. This would apply if we were just talking about a software library or something, but there IS actually a legitimate reason to have a community around Hyprland in that it's a window manager, so people can share their scripts, creations, and any issues they run into that aren't necessarily bugs, plus other things I'm probably forgetting. And since that Hyprland Discord server is run by the chief maintainer, these community problems are actually his problems since it's his Discord.

I think you should treat retards as retards

You're assuming though that the trans person is the aggressor here in the Discord chat. It may be. It may not. We don't know how "pushy" they might have been, if at all. It might have just been a simple, "I'm a 'she', but it's fine. I'll just update my nick to make it more clear."

Delusional people shouldn't be dictating terms, demand respect, or even be writing code.

That's a whole different can of worms. I might bump my old thread on this again because I don't think I gave this the full discussion it needs.
 
but there IS actually a legitimate reason to have a community around Hyprland in that it's a window manager, so people can share their scripts, creations, and any issues they run into that aren't necessarily bugs, plus other things I'm probably forgetting.

People can share their scripts in a dedicated space for that. It's merely distracting to the people who write the core of the project.
Issues are appropriate, but there's already a system for that on github. It's called "issues". Issues do not need personalities associated with them or a community around them.

Nor does there need to be a discord, but that's the maintainer's own fault for not making a proper forum.

"I'm a 'she', but it's fine. I'll just update my nick to make it more clear."

Code doesn't care about your pronouns, or even your species. Any mention of such is a distraction from the code. Drawing attention to yourself in such a way should be discouraged.

That's why the first link is a meme. If you announce that you are a girl on an anonymous image board, you are disrupting the anonymity of it all, and drawing attention to yourself.

Permissiveness and giving power to these people in the form of "rules to exclude people on the basis of inclusivity" is how institutions get captured. Creators have been exiled from their own communities thanks to infiltrators like this.
 
Nor does there need to be a discord, but that's the maintainer's own fault for not making a proper forum.

I was about to say, we can talk about ideals and what we would do, but at the end of the day, the chief maintainer made an official Discord server and he runs it. Simple as that. And once again, we come back to the importance of having SOME kind of rules in place if he really is going to have such a server, even if it was simply, "No discussion of personal information is allowed whatsoever."
 
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