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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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 (2 children)

The fascists have been incredibly effective at diverting people to all the conversations that don't matter. It's the same strategy as always -- "be loudly wrong about an insignificant issue and watch the leftists jump to correct you."

Anduril is mentioned once in the NixOS thread and zero times in the aux.computer thread. So let's say I'm not hopeful.

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

“be loudly wrong about an insignificant issue and watch the leftists jump to correct you.”

It's taken me way too long to learn how to avoid falling for weaponized nerd sniping, and it still gets me sometimes.

NSFW Edit: This is why we sneer, innit? Be laconic, be witty, and deprive fashy bullshit the dignity of an effortful reply.

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

absolutely! there’s a clear pattern to how fascists take over FOSS projects and the commons in general. what’s interesting is how visible it all is in Nix’s case; they aren’t even bothering to hide what they’re doing, other than the typical distortions from the fash weirdos flooding Nix’s discussion forums. in this case it’s such an obvious bait and switch, and it sucks to see people fall for it yet again.

I really should start writing about technofascism again. it’s becoming increasingly important that FOSS projects learn about and are ruggedized against the pathways fascists use to take over the commons, because if this obvious shit keeps working, we’ll have nothing of value left.