Stuart Henderson wrote:
Lunduke had a video talking about various Linux distros banning people from
mentioned any of his content, like the Arch Linux forums. I actually want
to post something to the Arch Linux forums and mention one of Lunduke's
technical
videos. Apparently, if you do that, then you get banned from the Arch Linux
forums.
Oh I see, it's one of those "let's not talk about politics" bellends who
proceeds to shove their politics down your throat.
I'm not surprised community sites are reacting like that to be honest.
I don't think it is weird to want things that are not openly partisan.
Let's face it, the way society is structured in the West makes it so
nearly anything that is not built from the ground up to be independent
will be taken over by political forces. There is a lot to be said about
enshittification of services due to greedy business models, but you
didn't hear about enshittification of services due to politification
until very recently.
I have seen death by politics in a number of non-software related
communities. This is specially true when money is involved. Say you are
a member of a kart racing club, and the Mayor gives the club president
free stuff for the club using tax payer money... chances are the club
president will end up acting like a political proxy for the Mayor within
the community because the "free" stuff will only keep coming as long as
the club president keeps loyal to the party in power.
This sucks because at that point the club is a political pawn and the
main purpose of the club kind of becomes secondary... like you want to
use the club's installations but half of the time you can't because they
are hosting some political event. I have left clubs not because I
disliked the politics they were endorsing, but because it does not make
any sense to pay a membership fee if the club is not supporting the
hobby enough to justify membership. The harsh reality is that at certain
point the political agenda becomes more important than the hobby and the
people calling the shots won't care the least if the club becomes
ineffective at sustaining the hobby because they have other priorities.
I think complaints in this regard are warranted within the software
ecosystem because we all know software operations that have
(comparatively) huge amounts of resources poured into purely partisan
projects which are severely lacking on the software management front. I
am not going to point fingers but I can think of at least some software
operations which target a fantasy userbase that does not exist while
declaring openly that the current users they have in spades are not
their target audience.
The equivalent of this would be OpenBSD having a Gun Rights for Trans
Women division while port contributors leave because their patches and
code are ignored on the mailing list. Or, in practical terms, ejecting
people from a working team because they are known to be active in some
unrelated unpopular community - something I have seen happen on IRC back
in the day.
I am certainly not surprised that random people reacts in weird ways to
subtle pledges of political allegiance from software products they use,
to be honest.
