Less the reporter and more the subject, but: Yes, I understand and agree. That’s also a benefit of the private way which obscures the specifics by default, where as a public oriented system would be more based on selective redactions which need to be justified (which seems to be what some have called for here). As I mentioned, this would create a potential spectacle of every action, partly why private “reduce[s] the amount of tinder sparks threaten to ignite.”
My remark about being ‘unburdened’ is because I have no idea; I don’t keep up with this community or the rumors or mod actions (which are opaque at a glance; which again, is fine if they broadly have community trust). I just daily-drive NixOS as a regular user and hobby dev 'cuz “I want my software to work.” The private theory fits better for a forum like this imo which is why it’s more often used in enterprise. The Nix Discourse isn’t a grand exchange of ideas and debate: it’s a forum oriented around a software ecosystem. It hardly requires the rigor of a public system. The only reason people would want that is if they’ve lost trust in the mod team, wanted more spectacle, or if they’re pursuing an improved “purity of process” for idealistic reasons.
At a glance, it appears that the SC is trying to improve Mod credibility by providing a form of public oversight: to use a private theory externally for its benefits, but lean towards public internally (e.g. have the quote snippets and extensive mod details and justifications, but don’t publish them). This is quite common practice… Further, SC seems to have wanted “friction” e.g. self-criticism. This may be out of legitimate concern with a case in mind, or in pursuit of general improvement / as a safety.
But of course, that’s at a glance. A slightly deeper read implies there’s a lot more going on here, with how the mod team is resisting these measures and their complaints about interacting with SC. It seems there needs to be a more formal channel for communication between the two, and some expectations / groundrules need to be set. This isn’t usually needed for teams of this size, but … perhaps we Nix users are a little predisposed to certain things. The fact that things have gotten to this point alone, in addition to the “proposal vs. demand” claims, means there has been a serious communication breakdown between the parties, on top of whatever issues fuel the underlying friction.
With all that said…
This is of greater concern… And due to the opaque nature of using a private model, things like this thrive (more easily). My only interest here is that “my software works”, and this, like the drama, can threaten that because
Any overt support for military projects will surely push very talented people away. There’s nothing Nix can do to prevent its use in such environments: it’s merely a tool, and tools will be used. But alignment with such efforts would be detrimental to Nix. Dropping Anduril as a sponsor was wise. But…
It’s unclear if this is relevant. While Anduril’s desire to exert influence over Nix is (imo) undeniable, I’m not yet convinced that this issue should be seen as a proxy war between Anti/Pro Anduril factions. However, with the lack of transparency and previous controversies, I can understand why some would have come to that conclusion. It really depends on what we don’t know: e.g. if SC was targeting individuals in an effort to push an agenda, or if this is just an epic communications breakdown. Who made those calls; who suggested what, and what was their reasoning. I doubt we’ll ever know.
Perhaps the eligible voting members should be voting on more than just representation?
I would like to emphasize that this is not some sort of new problem; this governance mess has been ongoing in various forms for many years now, and there are years of paper trails and evidence and discussions and whatnot. It’s pretty clear what’s going on, who the players are, and what their intentions are. It’s not just a communication breakdown, and eg. the lack of shared values was already established with certainty during the governance talks (I believe these are all public to read back).
So with all due respect, I don’t think a “blank-slate analysis” is going to achieve anything here besides creating a veil of false hope for improvement in the project. We already know what the problems are, the people responsible just refuse to address them head-on and take an actual stance. That’s the only thing we’re really blocking on here, and no amount of deliberation or discussion will change that.
The only possible way out of this mess is for project leadership to take a definite ideological stance, any ideological stance, and tell everyone else to pack up and leave. Then whichever group gets told to leave can go off and do their own thing instead, and we’re all going to be better off for it.
Most of the damage in these threads is done by this idea that whatever is said here will be used and direct the project direction.
That leads to a lot of people anxiously following the threads, wondering what is going to happen. This in itself is hugely damaging. I think it’s toxic to people who come here to escape the real world and just want to hack on things (which I believe is the majority of hackers).
Then the other outcome is that some people (who care about the project a lot) are compelled to revert to less civil forms of communications, in an attempt to force their point of views trough. This lack of cilivility is hugely damaging to the reputation of the project. It destroys any possibility of finding a consensus (assuming it would be possible with an open set of participants), and creates more work for the moderation team.
That’s why we have the SC now. If you want things to happen, please contact your elected member. Talk to them in private. And ask then to do a good job to represent your needs.
I’m not so sure that I understand this part of your post. Let’s say that you’re correct and that Anduril does want to exert control over the community. Let’s also say that Andruil succeeds in exerting control over the community. In this possible situation where Andruil successfully exerts control over the community, what would happen? What changes would we see?
This is another part that I’m not so sure about. What would a military takeover of the community look like?
(Also, that quote means that at least one person thinks that I am complicit in a military takeover of the community. I guess that I’m OK with that. I don’t personally think that I am complicit in a military takeover of the community.)
I’m pretty sure we’ll also never get a formal apology from SC member @tomberek for condescending towards the community… or an apology from the SC as a collective. It seems like they chose to burn even more bridges.
being targeted by a public mob
to protect people from bullying behavior,
There is nothing to be gained by continuing to debate in this thread - try not to get suckered into it.
Clearly a narrative is being formed here that the people who spoke out about their concerns are being labeled as bullies. The choice quote from Palmer Luckey makes me less respect employees of Anduril even more. Anduril is aware of the damage they’re causing and how their mere presence only affirms it.
Nix is already being spoken about as a Nazi Bar at this very moment online, the damage has already been done and it’s all the fault of an SC where certain members really want to cling onto their positions rather than see the writing on the wall and take the fall to save face.
Nix isn’t your escapist fantasy where the world disappears and you live and breathe derivations. We (the community) are not doing free emotional labor for people who think we are their playmates and buddies. It’s incredibly toxic to say this and then in the other hand complain about “This lack of cilivility.”
How is this supposed to be a civil space when this is supposedly a personal playtime for privileged hackers? Community is when a child of migrant workers wants to contribute to Nix and has to be nice and respectful to a community-elected representative who willingly took a position to help design and develop weapons to hunt down and surveil their parents (but it’s all “defense” remember?)
You ask this question because you have deliberately not take the safety of the moderation team into account. They deserve more safety than us because they are the ones who safeguard the safety of our community. Actions putting people safety at risk should not be allowed in any circumstances.
Sorry I digress, but I found NixOS nixos.org suddenly stop celebrating pride month recently.
Is it also caused by interference of SC? I cannot find any information about that.
It is important info for people to learn how to vote, which I think is the actual reason why this post is created: to let people learn how to vote correctly.
In my opinion, the moderators were often overstepping their role, and their actions did not help maintain a focus on technical discussion. I would be willing to assist with moderation if needed after their resignation.
Why is this being discussed in a public space? It just opens up the venue for people to do fearmongering, sealioning and other kinds of *ing, which creates a negative view of the NixOS project, while surely the deciding discussions are done in private
Sorry for the chaotic post; I’ll start out with some responses (bit reactive), and then get to the interesting stuff, or maybe read all of it, idk. I blame slow mode
General vibe and CoI
I feel the same.
I also agree that moderation generally did a good job towards the community, and I’m grateful for that.
I do wonder what degree of drama the SC eliminated by resolving issues before they would be public and unnecessarily controversial, but this is impossible to quantify.
I admit we made a big mistake in our communication here. 1 CoI change shouldn’t have been a big deal, despite it being a controversial company, but we failed you on that by not communicating it sooner. You’re right to hold us accountable for that, and I can assure you we don’t have other problems of this sort, and he does not hold power over the rest of us.
Let me know if there’s other events that made you lose trust. I am aware of the need for more transparency.
I guess you really are that desperate to recruit new Lixers - no offense to the Lix project, shoutout to them.
Apparent misconception about moderation
Classic mistake, I would say, except you’ve taken this out of context. I know full well that “objective” is not possible. I said more objective, meaning to refer to situations in which subjective decisions have lead to the CoC not being upheld, making mods’ work unnecessarily difficult in the long term.
Some clarification around removal
No intent to “frame” here. We did remove a moderator for their conduct, and I can see this was communicated in a minimal way, but also we weren’t asked this question. My verdict: both parties could have done better in terms of communication, but not much better was to be expected because of tensions.
I don’t want to paint a target on anyone’s back. I believe all moderators had good intentions, but some resisted any effort towards accountability. This had to change.
A general attitude of refusing to work with the SC, and some moderation decisions or lack thereof, which may well have been excusable if they were cooperative. I’ll explain why this is truly important, and just something about SC power.
The SC is the elected body governing the whole community, including various powers to intervene when it deems necessary. We don’t do this lightly, and this power can not be limited except by constitutional change, which can be undone by future SCs.
This is good, because SCs are elected by the community, which means that the community retains its power.
Democratic context
For good outcomes to occur, we need all links to work reasonably well. In reverse order of “accountability to”:
community members select good candidates
the SC uses its power appropriately
teams collaborate with the SC to improve
We (2) have established an instance of dysfunction in (3) and now you (1) are inquiring us (2) to see if we are dysfunctional, because (3) has signaled such.
This is the democratic process doing its job, so thank you.
It is decidedly not a failure of governance (however much I wish it went smoothly), but a feature of democratic governance, which you are part of.
This is complicated, and one of the things that makes democracy difficult. I hope we can focus on the issues and their causes, and not jump to conclusions based on the overall vibe, as it happens all too much in real life democracy.
I don’t think apologizing for other representatives is good democratic culture. It would suggest that we are not independent of one another, but we are independent; by design and even enforced by CoI rules.
Analogy with moderation
I believe both the SC and moderation were operating in “damage control” mode, each in their own way:
The SC was too careful about their public communication, the “speaking with one voice”. This had a calming effect at first, but ultimately made us too “shy” in public
The moderation team was making too many political calculations. This made their job harder than it needed to be, served their reputation well until now, but ultimately would not be sustainable, even if we had not demanded any change
Where the analogy breaks down is that the mod team only had to be accountable to us (which I feel should have been straightforward except for circumstances), so the community is happy with the relative calm, whereas for the SC that’s quite the opposite.
So the goal for me and the new SC is to build and rebuild trust with a mostly new moderation team.
Communication breakdown due to tension
Communication has been less than stellar in the SC/Moderation shared private channel.
A lot of this can be traced back to a lack of trust.
As an SC member I often felt held back by a lack of agreement or other certainty when talking in the channel
My assumption is that moderators were fearful for interference by the SC.
No automatic transparency. We were not offered automatic access to more info than the broader community, and we clearly did not feel empowered to demand this. This circumstance steered conversations towards mere facts, leaving less attention for insightful discussion if that were perhaps possible
As we made more suggestions that slowly turned into a somewhat hostile attitude between some of us (some SCers vs some mods)
All that said I don’t want to paint a picture of it being all terrible. A lot of good things also happened in the channel.
The main pain points I feel about this are the general friction, and the excessive need for political maneuvering because of the low trust in both directions.
It would have taken absolutely superb communication to overcome our strained initial setup, but alas, not the strong suit of most of us nerds [affectionately], and having to somehow act together as SC and individual representatives made the whole setup a minefield to navigate.
I hoped that we could improve this over time, but with these resignations, the good news is that we can accelerate work to increase trust with new moderators and with that, start making process changes in support of accountability.
Accountability to the community
Going back to moderation accountability, this is of course a sensitive activity.
For instance, as others have also observed in this thread, detailed moderation logs can not be public, because that would cause a severe compromise of privacy.
This makes accountability directly to the (1) community impossible, so in order to establish accountability, we need an indirection, and currently that indirection is the SC.
That could be arranged differently, but I’d be wary of anything that introduces a direct mandate from community factions to individual moderators, as well as anything that further dilutes community power through more indirections or bureaucracy.
Most importantly though, we have not yet even observed accountable moderation in practice, so changing course right now would be premature.
Some final words
As for the accusations I’ve read in this thread, they’re pretty ridiculous.
I’m a progressive, if you haven’t got to know me. I’d gladly out any fascist conspiracies if they’d happened, but one elected man changing jobs in line with his past career isn’t that. Democracy isn’t perfect but we have a handle on this. I’ll keep you posted.
I was elected without a strong stance on moderation. I’ve helped in implementing the new governance as part of the SC. I believe this can still be a good turning point for moderation, where have an opportunity to advance past the misconceptions about our roles in the system. Where SC and moderation can communicate safely to learn from each other, and both can build trust with the community as a whole.
I may have gotten something wrong in my post. We’re in slow mode, so I won’t be able to respond quickly or possibly at all in this thread. I didn’t have to write this, and my neck is on the line, but I think it’s important to keep you in the loop and to engage in an honest conversation. I hope to do more of that and less of the careful maneuvering that only really brought us here anyway.
This is a position that I find difficult to understand. If it’s important to you that you never contribute to source code which gets utilized, even indirectly, by companies affiliated with war/defense, what gave you the idea that you could contribute to an open source project under a license that allows it while still meeting that goal? The license of nix and nixpkgs is completely incompatible with your ideals. We all made a decision when we started contributing under the existing license. If any of us didn’t understand the ramifications of that decision, we only have ourselves to blame.
Where does this leave you? You have exactly two options:
Change your ideals. Accept that some people you think are bad are going to use and contribute to the project, with the understanding that if it wasn’t Nix, it would be something else, and take solace in the fact you’ll continue to play a part in making the world a better place by creating an objectively useful software tool.
Stop contributing to the project and make a new one. Create an alternative nixpkgs tree from scratch and license the entirety of it under your new anti-defense license which bans all usages and contributions from your political opponents. You may need to hire a lawyer to draft this correctly, it won’t be easy. You may not relicense any existing code without contacting every nixpkgs contributor.
You seem to want a third option:
Continue to contribute to the project, but engage in passive-aggressive tactics to make life a living hell for certain people, depending on their employer, even when it’s completely irrelevant and they’re posting totally benign technically-sound patches back to the community.
I don’t speak from a position of authority here, but I trust that the majority of nix/nixpkgs/nixos users and contributors agree with me when I say: that’s completely unacceptable. This is an open source software packaging solution, not a political arena. If you can’t find a way to bring yourself to embracing Option 1 above, please don’t try to keep one foot in the community so you can try to rehash this nonsense yet again in a few months, please go reread the license you agreed to, and then go get a new hobby. This is not participating in good faith in creating a better Nix, which is why the other 98% of us are here. Whatever technical contributions you’ve made or will make, someone else will fill in.
Chiming in to say that Discourse has 0 Karma mechanism, so the length or strength of people’s posts on here do not—in any way—correspond to their involvement in the community.
In particular, that a post by people like lassulus gets buried in a stream of ragebait by people who I’ve never seen before gives me pause. Slow mode or not.
I don’t understand how the safety of the moderation team is compromised by documenting their deliberations, but the safety of the moderation team isn’t compromised by listing its membership on GitHub and proudly announcing new additions and departures.
Deep down I don’t think you understand the argument either.
I’ve been reading through this as someone who occasionally reads discourse and posts on it (and I try to work to improve the ecosystem, but still feel a bit green). I don’t have a good handle on the moderation bar here, which I feel also allows me to look at this thread from a somewhat detached point of view. Detached from Nix, that is; I may still have views on the topic of moderation and governance.
Here’s some random thoughts that the discussion raises for me:
First of all, I do belong in the population that sometimes seems to have a distrust of moderation. I don’t believe in an environment that allows everything, and I get that moderation is necessary; but, personally, I think many online communities have taken moderation to an undesirable extreme. Frankly, I think that 1990s BBS cesspools or the Linux kernel mailing list are/were more functional communities than some of the modern heavily moderated ones. The optimum probably lies somewhere in between.
Again, that is what I think in general; I do not know how these have been applied in the Nix ecosystem. For calibration, I have been following the Python community more closely; it also struggles with people not trusting moderators. I would nominate it as an example of a broadly functional community with slightly too heavy handed moderation for my taste.
I am rather concerned by the thought that moderators should not be accountable to the apparently single democratically elected body and overseen by them. It is my experience that desire to volunteer as a moderator tends to correlate with wanting to moderate too much. I’m sure opposite examples exist. Now, I alluded to some moderation being too heavy for my taste above. I think this is crucial: The people should get to decide how heavy handed it is. Not only those who want to moderate. I think there should be a feedback mechanism that tells the mod team which direction they should go.
Above, someone balked at the idea that moderators are compared to police (instead of paramedics). This confuses me greatly, and suggests to me that there is some very strange thinking going on. Isn’t the role of the police pretty exactly what the role of moderators is? It’s about using some public powers often to silence people, for a time, against their will. That is policing, not paramedic. It’s also necessary sometimes. And similar to policing in the society, there absolutely should be some oversight that somehow traces to those who get to vote.
It was said that the role of the SC is to delegate. Sure. The ministers in a government also don’t patrol the streets themselves. That doesn’t mean the police force becomes, or should become, a coequal branch of government.
Borrowing from the government idea: Perhaps what could be done is have one “minister” in the elected SC who is also a member of the moderation team and works as a conduit?
I get it, someone somewhere in a steering committee apparently works for a weapons company. I expect anything I do anyway under an open source license to be used by anyone for anything if they so desire. This person being in a steering committee, it seems to me, does not magically make the rest of the people “do free work for the armaments industry”. They probably do what they’re paid to do, and the rest of us do what we want to do or are paid to do. If you’re concerned, try to not reelect them. And if other community members reelect them anyway, accept that you don’t always get what you want in anything resembling a democracy. That’s a feature.
Having said all that:
There are always personalities in play, and it is entirely possible that the SC has made unreasonable demands. I do not have the visibility to that. Reasoning purely from what has been said in this thread, the fact that the SC is exercising control is, to me, not in itself evidence of anything nefarious.
Also, there are systems that are based on something else than centralized power for moderation. Karma based systems. Different distributed systems. I must admit it rubs me the wrong way that information is hidden so it cannot be dug up to see what is being moderated out of existence. In my naive idealistic view, that should mostly happen 1) when legally necessary; 2) likely when the people themselves decide to delete their posts; 3) pretty much in no other case. If there’s a subculture that wants to browse and comment at “-1 flamebait” level, I don’t see why you need to prevent it instead of just hiding it. Now, I haven’t seen a karma based system that I’d like, so this is more theoretical; the main point is that I disagree with what seems to be a core assumption that so much content needs to be made irretrievable, not only so we’ll hidden that only those see it who go look for it.
I would like to say, that as newer member of this community coming from other Linux Distro’s, I found this response here to succinctly put my abstract feelings surrounding this whole situation. I have never come across a Linux distro that I happened to like as much as nix, the community just seems to turbulent and toxic towards anyone who doesn’t fit exactly into… like a high school clique but instead of the popular kids it’s a bunch of different people screaming over each other about what is the most pious way to make a Linux distro. I appreciate you crafting the actual argument to the abstract feelings that I have gotten reading this thread.
Just so you know, I have never been officially involved with Lix in any kind of capacity, and I have not participated at all for half a year. I have also consistently criticized many of the decisions made by Lix team, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. And yeah, shoutout to them - they have improved their governance story which I criticized relentlessly, and their governance is now better than what SC has achieved.
I ask you to refrain from making uneducated jabs like this.
I see you taking your own stance and expressing your own opinion. No questions about that. But this doesn’t track with how SC operates: by making public statements as a single unit, not publishing any kinds of chat logs, not publishing votes on issues. Your own statements and the language you use confirm as much: you don’t comment on what you have done as an SC member, and instead comment on what “we”, the SC, have done:
If you want to claim independence - then you don’t get the luxury of covering up behind the group name. And really, I would like you to also advocate for independence of other members, and encourage them to speak up. I have not seen @Ericson2314 speak up on any issue important to the public, ever, besides this thread with “I agree with everything Robert said”. Neither have I seen @jtojnar speak up. What work do they do in SC? Because from the outside, I can’t tell at all.
By the way, why does CoI allow 3 members of the Nix team to be present on one SC? Doesn’t exactly convey your independence, considering you’ve been working together for years on a single project. Poses a clear conflict of interest too, having to act as a team member and an SC representative at the same time.
If we want to continue this “democracy” LARP, then granting unlimited power (limited by constitution, but SC is the only body that can change the constitution, so in practice unlimied) to someone who was “elected” is undesirable. In democracies, the branches of government are independent, and each one has leverage over other, and there is general public that can (and will) protest unfavorable changes. What you are describing here is a dictatorship with a democratic front. How does the community retain its power, then?
Rightfully so, it seems, because that’s exactly what ended up happening.
I would like to once again point out that you’re trying to act like an individual representative, but also keep up the image of the “SC as a single unit”. It is completely obvious that SC is polarized. You don’t have to keep up the appearances and sugarcoat things: the individuals who were directly responsible for this can speak for themselves.
Yeah, I don’t know what world you live in, but 5/7 members resigning is not “good news”. No problem was solved here - you just replaced the moderators and expect more loyal ones to comply. It is not a positive development - it is just a power move.
No, they can’t. The moderation has resigned. Those people clearly can’t community safely and learn from SC. You just changed people and kept the same name of “moderation”. But those are different people. The problem was not solved - you just put an old label on new people.
There’s no conspiracy to speak of. SC member has quite literally taken a job from a fascist company, knowing full well there’ll be backlash. SC as a whole covered this up. When news came up, SC members came forward as individuals to cover for him. Said SC member has dismissed concerns that were brought up, playing it off as if he was collectively bullied. Later, founder of said fascist company has publicly reinforced his position, speaking plainly that the company intends to ignore those concerns.
You being dismissive of those facts doesn’t paint you as a progressive. Just FYI.
I heavily advice you to consider adding “mutual destruction” clause that Rust has, and do a complete do-over at this SC thing, now with actually transparent processes, possibilities for community to retract vote of confidence in members that have decided to go serve fascist companies, and declining the second year. That way, you’ll actually get closer to some solution, instead of disbanding teams and claiming it is “good news”.
I guess you really are that desperate to recruit new Lixers - no offense to the Lix project, shoutout to them.