Behind every FOSS governance problem is seemingly a tech dude who holds the keys but just doesn't care
@joepie91 yea very curious of the actual numbers of FOSS governance issues ultimately come down to some dude thinking "racism/sexism/queerphobia/etc doesn't affect me and I don't see it, therefore it doesn't exist"
@balrogboogie That is definitely often a factor, though I've seen the same thing happen without the bigotry component too. My working theory is that the most privileged among us are accustomed to the system Working For Them (ie. things "just magically work") and therefore do not recognize that they have a role to play themselves in making things happen
@balrogboogie As usual, the most dangerous form of privilege might well be the *unrecognized* privilege
totally agree and wonder if a multi repo development model coupd help here.
git as such doesnt know a main repo.
by making it easy for people to fork and community to move and users to transition effortlessly.
I dont think the type of white dudes you mention will ever change, but we can work towards a model where there nobody can gate keep the way they do now 🙂
@serapath @balrogboogie I have strong doubts about that approach, to be honest - ultimately the gatekeeping rarely happens on the actual technical level, so I don't think that's really the right problem to be solving.
Even with a nominally distributed development model, the vast majority of users are going to have some notion of an 'official' or 'canonical' branch, and it's going to be the one with the best marketing (which is where privileged folks have an advantage).
Even excluding that, you will run into interoperability problems; just look at how much Mastodon is imposing its constraints on the rest of fedi, despite the protocol nominally being open, purely by its relative size and fame in the ecosystem. Same deal with Element and Matrix.
So no, I don't think that "avoiding governance" (which is what decentralized repos boil down to) is a sustainable solution. We're going to have to actually engage with the deeper governance problems and find ways to avoid these problems specifically, while still doing governance.
i do think fork and merge is a governance model as well.
you talk, you resolve, but last resort you fork and maybe merge again in the future... or not.
you keep clients compatible or not....
make that easy and by indicating what your peers or friends use and have it a button click away to switch your software client, it becomes a lot less attractive to gatekeep, because gatekeepers know, if they insist and play hardball, ppl might actually fork.
if they have to fear a fork less, because its high effort and not standardized, not part of the governance, not an easy option, neither for devs, but even less so for users, than trying to capture, hijack or insist on gatekeeping has much higher rewards and basically thus incentivizes the behavior because of those
@joepie91 @balrogboogie
yes, thennotion of official has to go away.
maybe it should show what your friends are using