FreeAssembly

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this is FreeAssembly, a non-toxic design, programming, and art collective. post your share-alike (CC SA, GPL, BSD, or similar) projects here! collaboration is welcome, and mutual education is too.

in brief, this community is the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. read this article for a solid summary of why having a less toxic collaborative community is important from a technical standpoint in addition to a social one.

some posting guidelines apply in addition to the typical awful.systems stuff:

all types of passion projects and contributions are welcome, including and especially those that aren't programming or engineering in nature
this is an explicitly noncommercial, share-alike space
don't force yourself to do work you don't enjoy, or demand it of others

(logo credit, with modifications by @[email protected])

founded 7 months ago

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[email protected]

an open letter to the NixOS foundation (save-nix-together.org)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.

even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Lobste.rs is an offshoot of HN, started mainly because HN accepts a lot of stuff that's not computing. So it's laser-focussed on that, but of course, open source governance drama is on-topic.

People have been banned for being both regular assholes and bigots - one of the features is an open modlog:

https://lobste.rs/moderations?moderator=%28All%29&what%5Busers%5D=users

But of course part of the memetic evolution is that fascists have become very good at being acceptable community members, by never giving the mods enough rope to hang them with.

Here's the discussion, btw. I've been a long-term member so I "know" where some people stand. See if you can detect them!

https://lobste.rs/s/0qvtim/open_letter_nixos_foundation

edit I can extend invites to those who wish one, but I'll do basic vetting first.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

my biggest gripe with lobsters is that the mods pretend that software development happens in vacuum and is done by spherical avatars of an idea of a programmer, so any social issues should never be mentioned aloud or – worse yet – discussed.