Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025) @joepie91@pixie.town

It would be very nice if my migraine would finally go away

Here's your monthly(?) reminder that the Free Software movement is not meaningfully different from the Open-Source movement, that neither of the two are equivalent to "copyleft", that "copyleft" isn't working in practice either, and that the real problem here is capitalism and tolerance of it within FOSS communities, not the licensing model.

Invite a wolf into your community, get eaten. Requiring them to wear sheep's clothes doesn't fix that.

I'm more and more thinking about who would *actually* have my back when shit goes down with transphobia and such, and the answers so far are not pretty

I want to briefly talk about a problem that I've been seeing pop up a lot over the past couple of years.

It goes something like this: someone sets up a community thing (own project, Mastodon instance, whatever), follows 'DevOps principles', pays for it out of pocket, and then something happens to their income and suddenly there's a massive bill that cannot be paid.

The problem here is that a community is not a company, the budget is extremely finite, and that's something you should be accounting for from the start.

Yes, you might be okay with paying the costs out of pocket, but at some point something *will* go wrong, and you won't be able to afford it, and now your community needs to cough up the costs - and they often won't be able to.

Many of the "modern DevOps" practices exist not because they make things so much better, but because they are extremely profitable on the provider side. Companies can afford this tax; your community cannot.

A brief and non-exhaustive list of such things, some of which are additionally also fragile:
- Nickle-and-dime cloudycloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.)
- Microservices (including 'serverless')
- Zero-downtime deployments
- Extensive performance monitoring or tracing infrastructure
- Kubernetes and the like

These are all things that you should *avoid* by default. They can very easily inflate your hosting bill by 10x (or more) compared to a bog standard "rent a cheap Linux server/VPS" approach; and none of them are really going to matter for your community project, even those that might have legitimate benefits in other situations.

Your project will almost certain fit on a standard Linux server. It'll cost you <$50 per month instead of $500 per month. Low enough that even if disaster strikes, it's easy to cushion the blow collectively. The availability and performance will be completely fine for a community project.

(Background: I have a decade+ experience in running non-commercial things on a shoestring budget, including high-traffic ones, also advising others on it. I promise you that it is entirely possible if you're careful about where you spend your money.)

A follow-up explaining what I mean, since someone asked me for clarification:

A frequent example is tone policing of marginalized folks; the discussion of "should this marginalized group [of which I am not a part] be allowed to speak loudly, accuse, or generalize - do their circumstances justify it?"

There's other cases too, like arguing "actually police aren't racist, it's just because of higher crime numbers" or the infamous trans bathroom 'debate'. Another example of a slightly different kind would be "but can you *prove* that that happened?" to people who got sexually assaulted.

Basically anything where people cannot accept that maybe marginalized folks know what they're doing, and that they might be right even if you don't immediately see how.

That's probably the easiest way to identify the problem - people refusing to just (provisionally) believe that marginalized folks are speaking the truth, and instead approaching it from an angle of "I cannot accept it to be true unless I can reason towards it from my own understanding".

Those are the sort of discussions that one just *shouldn't* have; instead one should be listening to marginalized folks, provisionally accept that they are speaking the truth, and gradually do the work *themselves* of untangling the reasons behind it.

I want to take a moment to thank particularly the Black and Brown folks on here who have talked about and explained how to learn from them (ie. "read, don't challenge") - it has really helped me conceptualize the idea that sometimes, there are discussions that you just shouldn't be having, and often it is because it's not your place to be having them as it is not your lived experience. No matter how well you think you understand the situation.

While it's a concept that I've sort of intuitively understood for a while, I never quite understood it in a form that I could apply to situations outside of my own. This has helped with that a lot, by making it a more concrete principle.

Now I only wish that other people understood this concept too. It ends up being applicable in so many cases.