When we talk about free and open source software it’s usually in technical terms - the source is available, anyone can inspect it, fork it, change it or contribute. But all those things only work and make sense in the context of a minimum level of honesty, good faith, reciprocity, patience and mutual recognition of each other’s humanity.
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All of society runs on good faith, this isn’t just an open source thing.
Not at all, most things run on rules and policies.
…which are only upheld because of good faith.
…no, they’re held up by consequences.
It takes waaay more energy and time to debunk a false narrative than it takes to construct and spread a false narrative. For example it’s really easy to claim “PieFed secretly hardcodes a blocklist” but disproving it requires
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
In principle yes, in practice it’s much harder. People want to be on the safe side, sure the claim that the piefed developer eats babies seemed a but dubious and the evidence didn’t totally make sense to me but better safe than sorry I guess, there’s a hint of truth in every legend etc.
Maintaining a large FOSS project seems to always become such a shitstorm I’m surprised there’s anyone left doing it without profit incentives.
It’s particularly frustrating to see in projects like PieFed that I’ve been following from the start and I know the software and the intentions of the developers quite well, only to see a bunch of tin foil nutjobs and no life trolls attack it for all sorts of reasons ranging from the absurd to the deranged.
Yeah, you’d think so. But months after it happened people were still casually saying “Rimu stole code from Pylova” so I gave up waiting and just set the record straight.
I quickly had a look, it seems like you indeed set the record straight
Fascinating topic that has wide relevance, but yeah, I can certainly see how it’s especially apt in terms of good-faith projects like the FV. Love how the blog text is nicely to the point, also.
I have to thank my experience with webforums, Reddit and the FV, because they’re all things that helped hone my ability to reason, research, and work on communication. I feel like I can say that they actually helped me become a better person over time. Then again, I came in to the situation looking to grow and be of help where possible, generally-speaking. Others are coming in from much darker places, it seems, like those frustrated by the state of the world and those furiously pushing various agendas. Or just those who overestimate their own maturity, knowledge, etc, shades of Dunning-Kruger one might say.
Anyway, somewhat repeating what I’ve said in other comments, it does feel like a relatively low number of people are entering the FV with the concept of good faith necessary to power the open-source concept. More like it’s just a matter of convenience for them, and if it later becomes inconvenient, they’ll try somewhere else. So, not much buy-in there.
What to do, then? In a former emulation-type community I used to frequent, there was a lot of collaboration between folks, working on projects and sub-projects. There was a feeling that people were collectively pushing the project forward, and in real terms they were. So even though there was predictable squabbling and a certain amount of jealous competition, plus another segment of the user-base that was only there to take, not give, I thought it was a relatively healthy mechanism for building a shared group respect for the project en total.
In my own posts across the FV, I’m almost always trying to add value, info and interest to what might otherwise be a straight link or image, and a lot of my intent there is to help foster community and quality content for the FV. And yet it’s a steep hill. Stream-based social media content seems to build content-munchers who take such for granted because there’s always more, someplace. Or something like that. Au contraire, how does one foster real community, real buy-in, group-respect, and so forth? Maybe more group-style projects could help a bit…?
Social networks, either private or open, are known to take a mental toll on the maintainers/mods. Stay safe rimu! Much love.
I’m curious why all of the example “insults” seem to be making fun of supposed left-wing attacks. No mention of “woke” “retard” “communist” “braindead” etc.
Seems like a missed opportunity.
Because Rimu hates the left.
Perhaps because Lemmy and PieFed seem to be very left-leaning. People who post slurs or who hate on “woke” get banned or downvoted very quickly. They don’t gain enough traction or start enough drama to cause any real trouble (as far as I know) because we constantly punish these things. But people actually try to oppose bigotry here. And although most can agree on very obvious forms of bigotry, something something leftist infighting. And we’re the majority demographic on Lemmy and PieFed.
