Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

@mynameistillian I have complicated feelings about this. On the one hand, I don't *disagree* with any of the things described there. But I also recognize the risk in how those descriptions can be interpreted.

Because there are genuine reasons to expect people to immediately stop and reflect, those reasons just aren't "immediate superficial apology", but rather "training the 'muscle' of self-reflection". And I worry that if this distinction isn't made clear, this type of pushback is parsed as "we should become defensive again", which isn't good either, and gets us back where we started through overcorrection.

And likewise, the post mentions that we haven't addressed structural influence (ie. power) issues, which is true - but what it doesn't mention is that having healthy internal community dynamics (which includes self-reflection and making space) is likely going to be a prerequisite for making that change possible without drowning in unresolvable internal conflict!

I suspect that the author and I actually agree that the takeaway here should be "learn to talk out conflicts, and defensive and fawning responses are *both* problematic substitutes", but I'm not sure that the post makes that clear enough for people to extract that intention from it 😕

@russellmcormond Hmm. Is this available anywhere that isn't Amazon? I'm having trouble finding it...

@hans Or to put it more bluntly: Element has found a solution to a problem that Element has created.

@hans "What I understand is that if Element can reliably turn a profit every year, development of Matrix (and the broader ecosystem as a result) is secure."

That is how Element frames it. In practice, this is quite far from the truth - Element's stewardship has caused a *large* amount of volunteers to burn out or bounce off. I have personally spoken to many of them.

Volunteers which would have been able to provide that ecosystem security, which Element is infamously failing to provide, with their continuous technical and stewardship failures, and the increasing closedness of what are functionally the reference implementations.

There was never a lack of volunteer interest or labour availability. The problem has always been that Element did not provide the space for it to grow, and insisted on a highly centralized development model that only works with large amounts of funding.

@ramonita FWIW the supposed manifesto that that sentence is from, does not contain any of the phrases that the various news outlets claim are contained in the manifesto. I don't know which of the two is lying, but...

@hans I'm sure they want that. But that's of no concern to the broader ecosystem, and this kind of thing is precisely what wasn't supposed to happen. They have been warned many times that their business and developmental model is unsustainable (with assistance offered), and if they insist on continuing it anyway, then I have little sympathy for the decisions that they feel they need to eventually make.

The server in question is running with workers (couldn't keep up in monolithic mode) but I do not administrate it.