Gregory's Server@grimalkina drops a follow up thought that I will be thinking about for a long time https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112360789898873991
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8 comments
@Di4na @luis_in_brief open source has a culture and that culture has a problem. that goes deeper than moderation (an unsustainable job). Like if open source culture didn't hold so many hostage to a Great Man Syndrome such that even supposedly justice-aligned people tolerate massively toxic behaviors for fear of looking not techy, or not supporting the Saintly Efforts of the Appointed Few, less violence would be done to some of us who have the wrong demographics to be heard by this community.  @grimalkina @luis_in_brief I do not disagree, but I also think that this is only the visible part of the iceberg. A frigton of opensource, by far the vast majority of it, is a person doing this a couple hours a month in the middle of nowhere, with a really niche skillset. And in this situation, it is not "saintly appointed few", it is whoever had enough free time and mental space and privilege and interest in a really "hobbyistic" thing that end up the few. @grimalkina @luis_in_brief and then that model is reused in vastly different situations, and we get into what you really well describes. @grimalkina @luis_in_brief like, it is not because I am scared of not being techy that i had problems going against the great man in my domain. It is because noone else than this great man had the privilege to spend time on it. Going against him would have achieved nothing. And at some point i became the part going against him and the current expected result by everyone is that the tech that seemed able to make things better will disappear. @grimalkina @luis_in_brief If we want the system to change, and I want to, we need to go deeper than "cultural". There are systemic reasons we end up in these toxic and harmful patterns. @grimalkina @luis_in_brief (and by moderation, i mostly meant being able to push out the Appointed Few)  none of this is to say that such conflict is inevitable, or the default. I wouldn’t still be fighting for open communities if it was. But it is still frequent, recurrent, and brutally damaging to some of the things we claim to value most, like newcomers, non-code skill sets, and long-term investments that try to solve wicked problems. |
@luis_in_brief @grimalkina This is a well-known thing at this point. Openness can cost a lot; the moderation problem is not limited to FB. But we rarely equip our FOSS teams, especially the ones backed by big companies, with moderation teams and support.