Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community.
Exhibit A
It is a technical decision.
The technical reason is that the security team does not have the bandwidth to provide lifecycle maintenance for multiple X server implementations. Part of the reason for moving X from main to community was to reduce the burden on the security team for long-term maintenance of X. Additionally, nobody so far on the security team has expressed any interest in collaborating with xxxxxx on security concerns.
We have a working relationship with Freedesktop already, while we would have to start from the beginning with xxxxxx.
Why does nobody on the security team have any interest in collaboration with xxxxxx? Well, speaking for myself only here – when I looked at their official chat linked in their README, I was immediately greeted with alt-right propaganda rather than tactically useful information about xxxxxx development. At least for me, I don’t have any interest in filtering through hyperbolic political discussions to find out about CVEs and other relevant data for managing the security lifecycle of X.
Without relevant security data products from xxxxxx, as well as a professionally-behaving security contact, it is unlikely for xxxxxx to gain traction in any serious distribution, because X is literally one of the more complex stacks of software for a security team to manage already.
At the same time, I sympathize with the need to keep X alive and in good shape, and agree that there hasn’t been much movement from freedesktop in maintaining X in the past few years. There are many desktop environments which will never get ported to Wayland and we do need a viable solution to keep those desktop environments working.
I know the person who wrote this, and I know that she’s a smart cookie, and therefore I know that she probably understood at a glance that the community behind this “project” literally wants to lynch her. In response, she takes the high road, avoids confronting the truth directly, and gives the trolls a bunch of talking points to latch on for counter-arguments. Leaves plenty of room for them to bog everyone down in concern trolling and provides ample material to fuel their attention-driven hate machine.
There’s room for improvement here.
Exhibit B
Concise, speaks the truth, answers ridiculous proposals with ridicule, does not afford the aforementioned reactionary dipshits an opportunity to propose a counter-argument. A+.
Extra credit for the follow-up:
The requirement for a passing grade in this class is a polite but summary dismissal, but additional credit is awarded for anyone who does not indulge far-right agitators as if they were equal partners in maintaining a sense of professional decorum.
If you are a community leader in FOSS, you are not obligated to waste your time coming up with a long-winded technical answer to keep nazis out of your community. They want you to argue with them and give them attention and feed them material for their reactionary blog or whatever. Don’t fall into their trap. Do not answer bad faith with good faith. This is a skill you need to learn in order to be an effective community leader.
If you see nazis 👏👏 you ban nazis 👏👏 — it’s as simple as that.
The name of the project is censored not because it’s particularly hard for you to find, but because all they really want is attention, and you and me are going to do each other a solid by not giving them any of that directly.
To preclude the sorts of reply guys who are going to insist on name-dropping the project and having a thread about the underlying drama in the comments, the short introduction is as follows:
For a few years now, a handful of reactionary trolls have been stoking division in the community by driving a wedge between X11 and Wayland users, pushing a conspiracy theory that paints RedHat as the DEI boogeyman of FOSS and assigning reactionary values to X11 and woke (pejorative) values to Wayland. Recently, reactionary opportunists “forked” Xorg, replaced all of the literature with political manifestos and dog-whistles, then used it as a platform to start shit with downstream Linux distros by petitioning for inclusion and sending concern trolls to waste everyone’s time.
The project itself is of little consequence; they serve our purposes today by providing us with case-studies in dealing with reactionary idiots starting shit in your community.