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

Update: apparently it was a mistake on Github's end, and I have been unbanned.

Remaining questions:
- Why did that answer come 16 minutes after beginning to make noise about this?
- How could this happen in the first place?
- Why are there absolutely no mechanisms for repository owners to eg. undo this locally, so as to not break projects that were contributed to?

You get punted off to a 'community support forum' now

Also, I wonder how many people have realized that #Github just straight-up doesn't have a general support department anymore for free users

I've posted an updated summary of the situation, as its own post: https://social.pixie.town/@joepie91/110733995438668688

Summary of the #Github debacle so far:

- My account seems to have been flagged and shadowbanned, based on the symptoms, but it doesn't actually say this anywhere in the UI

- The reason is unclear; I've received no notification or explanation of any sort from Github, and had to find out through someone at $customer not being able to see my comments

- I sent a support ticket 16 hours ago, and have gotten zero response or acknowledgment so far.

- *All* of my content, except for commits, is hidden without notice; it looks deleted to anyone not logged in as me.

- My repos are gone. Any PRs and comments I've made in other repos over the past decade+ are gone. My Gists are gone.

- This includes at least one Matrix MSC that's entirely gone, and many review comments on other Matrix MSCs and NixOS RFCs. There's just entire chunks of the standards process history missing now.

- Github's account data export only includes my own repositories; all contributions to other projects are missing. Gists are completely missing.

- I can no longer do my job for $customer, that pays my income; because anything I post in their private company repositories(!!) is also invisible - including everything I've worked on over the years, retroactively.

Like, mistakes happen, an account can get flagged for erroneous reasons, fine. But it's slowly dawning on me just how much impact this is having, with seemingly no recourse. And it begs the question of how many other people this has happened to.

What nobody tells you about community management is that 90% of moderation work is having to endlessly deconstruct systemic and ingrained misbeliefs that people have picked up from toxic politics, debate culture, rape culture, etc.

None of which you were responsible for them starting to believe, but somehow you have become responsible for making them *stop* believing it, and the people in question may not even realize themselves that they believe it

I have just learned that Github's data export is, *at the very least*, missing Gists and all of my contributions to repositories that *aren't* mine. The only thing included is the data for my own repositories. What the hell.

Like, to be clear, the 'collateral damage' here is that all of those things - any issues or PRs I've created anywhere, any comments I've left on other people's issues or PRs - are just *gone*. No indication. As if they've never existed.

This means that historical parts of multiple standards processes have just... disappeared. For no good reason. With no recourse for the standards organizations involved.

This also seems like a pretty strong argument to *not* do any sort of spec work on Github, because apparently they will just disappear it with no recourse

Known (significant) collateral damage so far:
- My Matrix spec contributions, including at least one MSC that I wrote
- My NixOS contributions, including some fairly important contributions to RFCs
- Any work done for $customer that lives on Github

No response from Github yet. This is uh, maybe not a great way to deal with flagged accounts?

So one of the major differences between corporate software development and community software development is the difference in transparency.

In corporate projects, the default is secrecy; you don't tell stuff to outsiders unless you have a reason to. In community projects, the default is openness; you always do everything out in the open unless you have a reason *not* to.

And I think that the a lot of the problems people have with Element and - by extension - Matrix are to do with precisely that: Element's projects are run as corporate projects, not as community projects.

I don't mean that there's no spec process, or that it's proprietary, or that there's no work out in the open - I mean that it is not out in the open *by default*. As Element grows, it is becoming increasingly common to hear the word "internal".

"Internal" is the death knell of a community project. Internal projects, internal discussion, internal review, internal priorities. Internal means secrecy; not visible to the community, not taking its input, not *accountable* to that community.

Some things, like actively exploitable vulnerabilities, *need* to be kept internal - but most everything else shouldn't be. Spec changes shouldn't be under internal discussion. Refactoring shouldn't be an internal process.

Or to put it differently: at the very least, the full state of the project must be visible to the whole community at any given time - *without* actively having to ask The Right Person about it. Maybe in some cases read-only, but it must be visible without delay or barrier.

And if you're trying to run a community project as a corporation, yes, that means needing to disclose the internal workings of your corporation. Yes, also the 'company secrets'. Yes, also the internal bureaucratic processes.

And yes, also take feedback on them from the community. If you want to do it right, it needs to be a symbiotic relationship, even if that means not doing the 'standard thing' from a corporate perspective.

Element has failed to do this, and the result is that people are feeling more and more alienated from the process; a process which they increasingly have no visibility into, and zero control over.

It's nominally still a community project, but in practice there's always some unspecified and invisible "internal" roadblock standing in the way of contributions, with no timeline of any sort, and a distinct sense of neglect.

And that's how it ends up taking 7 years to fix a grating notification sound: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/5891#issuecomment-1620570919

Element needs to do better. The Matrix foundation, which Element is still the major contributor to in practice, needs to *demand* better. I think Matrix has real potential, but I would prefer if it didn't require a community fork to get there.

#Matrix #Element #FOSS

Occasionally someone will learn that the CW/CN field is called 'subject' in the protocol, and respond with "so people are just *misusing* the subject field!"

And I find it extremely telling when that is the first response, rather than "wait, why do people need to use the subject field for this, why isn't there a CW feature in the protocol?"