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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.
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.