Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

"Self-organized moderation", ie. trying to preferentially resolve moderation issues among peers rather than using power structures is a good thing to strive for, but...

You don't achieve that by telling people "we won't moderate, tell people yourself if you have an issue with them", you achieve that by codifying that boundaries of others must be respected and make it clear that you will step in if they're not.

If you just tell people to do it themselves, but you never actually provide the supporting infrastructure to do so, nor build the social culture necessary... then all you've done is declare open season on marginalized folks.

Reported to the landlord a while ago that there seemed to be birds nesting on the roof, under the solar panels. Contractor just showed up, and determined that I do not, in fact, have birds under the panels.

But every other house in the block does

@riley Wha. FiiO is making analog gear now?

I remember when they still just made budget portable speakers...

@pux0r3 @foone That "pulling up the ladder behind them" is such a plague in the tech industry.

Like, if you genuinely want to "have a broader conversation with the community", maybe you should actually give three shits about accessibility, instead of pre-selecting for well-off white tech dudes by your choice of venue?

OpenSSF: "We encourage everyone to join in on the conversation in the next days and weeks around FOSS supply chain security!"

Also OpenSSF: "We will be having that conversation at a physical event in North America [that many people will not be able to travel to, particularly those who are already underfunded and therefore at risk of maintainer compromise]."

Fucking 'foundations', every fucking time.

@ramsey This wasn't "trying to turn this into an argument". You asked for clarification; and I provided clarification, as requested...

10/10 shitpost

@ramsey No; rather that we should acknowledge that open-source development isn't the first to have this sort of situation, and hasn't created a unique circumstance.

There's a bit of a recurring problem where folks in tech communities rediscover social dynamics that many people outside tech have already dealt with for a long time (see eg. the "you reinvented the bus" memes), and then present them as some sort of novel revelation, without ever acknowledging the work that folks outside of tech have put into it in years prior.

This sort of exceptionalism also tends to creep into narratives about technology as a positive force; the discussion around UBI and open-source, but also for example the notion that "having computers means we no longer need to labour" (which isn't really any more true than it was after the invention of industrial machines).

That exceptionalism has a tendency of not just ignoring the lessons from history (like how there have always been good reasons for UBI, and plenty of data to support it, and it was buried for political reasons instead), but also of creating a further divide between "tech people" and "non-tech people"; where the progressive systems that take advantage of these 'novel' insights only really cater for the tech folks.

For UBI, this has already sort of been happening with some privately-run collective UBI-like schemes where only folks in tech are eligible. Sometimes to the detriment of solidarity and collective action towards introducing a true UBI for *everyone*, because tech folks then end up pulling up the ladder behind them.

So all I'm saying here, basically, is: yes, open-source development *is* a good argument for UBI, but it is not an exceptional one - and we should not treat it as such, lest we end up with a watered-down system that only really benefits the relatively-powerful few in tech.

Instead, we should see open-source development as just one of many forms of community work, all of which *as a category* are a very good reason for UBI, and should be presented *as a category* for the purpose of solidarity.