I have a lot of respect for Drew for the technical work he did, but it's difficult to take this seriously. Maybe because we come from very different cultures, I don't know. I've never felt the need for any "community" for my window manager of choice (which happens to be sway) and can't imagine what a "victim of harrasment" for such a thing would look like. If whatever the developer clique are doing (which are actually pushing the thing forward) works for them — great! I'd be just fine with it as a user.
> can't imagine what a "victim of harrasment" for such a thing would look like
Well, Drew's article gives a concrete example of a victim. But beyond this specific article, it is not difficult to find examples of people who were harassed when trying to be involved in an open source community. This is pretty much the reason why so many open source projects are adopting codes of conduct.
A community is just another name for somewhere you go to for troubleshooting, be it a forum, Stack Exchange or Discord? Unless you have never needed that, and that RTFM has been enough.
Sure, if you call that community. Bug reports or questions generally do not require mentioning your race, ethnicity, nationality or identity preferences. I've never done it and as a result never had problems with anyone¹. If someone actively drags politics of any kind into a purely technical discussion, and then looks surprised when some bigoted idiot blows his nut — well, that looks like a a completely made-up problem from my neck of the woods.
1: let me mention here that I come from an ethnic minority in my country and for reasons completely unrelated to this discussion am not welcome in many corners of the internet.
> Bug reports or questions generally do not require mentioning your race, ethnicity, nationality or identity preferences
Sure, but pronouns? If someone refers to you using the wrong pronoun (e.g., assuming you're male, which this Vaxry person apparently admits to doing), don't you want to point it out somehow?
> Bug reports or questions generally do not require mentioning your race, ethnicity, nationality or identity preferences.
There are people whose reply to that statement would be "Help! I'm being oppressed!" . The sort of people who say being race-neutral is white supremacy.
There's a lot of bored people who just want to feel like social activists because they've been taught it's noble (no matter how cringe it is to normal people). And there's no lower-effort way of doing this than causing drama in tech communities where no one cares about your race or gender. It's a perfect place to turn into a battleground, and then if they reject you, you run to social media to virtue signal about toxicity.
But to ask a question about bitmap rendering do you really need to enter you real name and pronouns of choice? Wouldn’t ‘potato04’ be good enough? I’d go as far as to say that your RL identity is off topic.
You have no right to a response from a community. Sure, it's a pity if you don't get support from a great project. But it's nothing you're guaranteed to receive. And that can even happen with projects that aren't considered toxic.
There is a Pacific Ocean between a “right” to a constructive response from a forum, and recognizing the much greater value of a forum that gives constructive responses.
And? They are not obliged to adhere to your definition of a constructive response or the form of community you or anybody wants as long as they stay within the boundaries of law. It's a pity, as I said, but if that's what the existing community wants to do, let them. Who are you to say otherwise?
But why should one not feel free on comment upon whatever they see, and comment however negatively they want to? Because we should be tolerant of all?
I find it interesting that the "anti-Woke" also end up appealing to same values of tolerance that the "Woke" appeal to. Perhaps it points to the lack of diversity in Western thinking.
You may quickly feel the need for a "community" when you start to contribute, learn about its insides and want to push the project forward. Unless you're happy with publishing to your own fork that nobody knows about, software development is a social activity that often spawns social relationships.
> I've never felt the need for any "community" for my window manager of choice
I think hyperland is big within ricing community, where people try to setup their own computing environment. It's a fun creative outlet, I used to do it a lot in high school. It taught me so much about linux which later on helped me professionally, so it's sad to see that the community isn't more inclusive.
I think Discord servers for a software project tend to attract a younger audience and are more noisy/active and have offtopic discussion, compared to something like a user/-dev channel on IRC.
