Okay, I'm just going to say it: the #NixOS community has an abuser problem.

I don't mean that it's *full* of abusers - most of the NixOS community that I've interacted with has been excellent! That's not the problem.

The problem is that there is a handful of people in the community, some of them in positions of power, who have been showing openly abusive behaviour for years now, with effectively no consequences - because they are the kind of abuser who uses 'civil' words.

This came to a head two days ago when one of them decided to run a deliberate experiment on my emotional state without my consent in a governance discussion, giving me an anxiety attack at 4am, but that is only the most obvious recent incident and not the first one.

That same person, and a number of others, have been concern-trolling every single moderation, CoC, governance and policy discussion to death for years (perhaps the most infamous example is RFC 98). They've been making patronizing comments towards lots of folks who are just trying to improve things a bit.

They've been going "oh but we shouldn't call fascism bad, that's polarizing". They've been trivializing very real problems that (particularly marginalized) folks are experiencing. They've been disrupting constructive governance conversations with bad-faith arguing.

I've been trying to resolve this problem privately for years now, but not enough is happening and I'm running out of patience, so perhaps it's time to call this out publicly. I'm withholding names for now, but if this doesn't get resolved on a community/moderation level, I might change my mind on that.