• oh boy I can’t wait for all of the integrations to break

            also is it just me or is deciding what software you use and do not pay for based on the political views of the people who create it (who again in no way benefit from its use by people who don’t donate) incredibly fucking stupid

                •  LukeZaz   ( @LukeZaz@beehaw.org ) 
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                  It is absolutely a reasonable interpretation to assume you were referring to the people making the decision you didn’t like. And even if it wasn’t, calling an idea a group of people have “incredibly fucking stupid” isn’t much different, as it carries an implication of how you see those people.

                  If you feel other people are getting offended too easily at what you say, I recommend spending extra time on your posts to ensure you avoid saying derogatory things you don’t intend for. Something that looks good to you can be incredibly insulting to others who read differently from you, and since conversation is a two-way street, that’s the kind of thing we all need to be aware of.

                  • so you’re saying i should have anticipated that people might have willingly misinterpreted “that is a stupid position to take and here is why” as “you as a person are stupid” and, instead of telling me why they thought I was wrong, try to get me banned from beehaw as a result?

                    i would’ve been okay if you’d just said yes and left it at that. but the “actually, you are calling me stupid” really rubs my fur backwards

            • @AVincentInSpace @remington The Lemmy devs are infamously difficult to work with. They’ve repeatedly shown an unwillingness to even acknowledge the existence of the many problems that instance admins face. That has been a big driver in Beehaw’s decision to move platforms, not just because of a difference in political views, and they’ve been pretty open about discussing it. You’re way off-base.

            • Do you know what topic brought you here?

              “Hey guys, let’s not use this free software, because of their views.”

              “Maybe we shouldn’t use this other free software because of their views.”

              “Why are you guys worried about which free software you use based on their views?”

              “We can all tell you aren’t new, why are you complaining about our unofficial pastime?”

              •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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                92 days ago

                It’s almost like the philosophy behind a software matters to its long-term stability. Like, as if devs might find reasons to, I don’t know, reject PRs, ignore bugs, and trash their users when they come to them for help.

                Weird that the content of someone’s mind might affect their actions or be an indicator of what level of trust they should be extended!

                • Programming is a form of communication. When you develop a piece of software, it will intrinsically be biased to boost the kinds of messages you believe in. This is both because you as a person think about problems a certain way, and because the code you write is meant to convey to others how you were thinking about the problem you were trying to solve. Who heads projects and how they communicate with their community matters to what the product produced will become, not just because of how the leads will think about the problem, but also because people who don’t get along with them won’t wind up contributing. Beehaw requested moderation tools that the lead lemmy Devs didn’t view as valuable. The result is beehaw, reasonably, gave up on getting PRs merged and issues tracked in the issue tracker, instead choosing to look at Sublinks which was explicitly started in response to Lemmy’s devs not behaving well with their own development community.

                  And for anyone saying Sublinks is splintering the Lemmy Dev community, no, lemmy’s devs did that themselves

                  •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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                    Yeah. We probably should.

                    Changing our behaviors isn’t a binary, though. It takes effort. Sometimes it takes changing the world around us first to accommodate new behaviors, or waiting for the right opportunity. And given all the other things we should also be changing, prioritizing matters.

                    Finding a Lemmy alternative is somewhere on that list. Is it anywhere remotely near the top? No. There are a great many other things to do. It’s probably closer to the top of alyzaya or Chris’s lists than mine; close enough, it seems, to be carried out even.

                    But it isn’t about trying to figure out who’s a shit and point fingers at them while loudly demonstrating non-shit behaviors. If we actually want to make the world better, we need to figure out how to work together rather than just glue everything in place.

                    People are so defensive about being wrong. And why wouldn’t they be? Whether you look at how things are set up in school or the cruelty and corruption of the prison system, or the poverty-reinforcing measures set about in our banking and credit rating systems, the elements that we need to grow past push this tendency to categorize people and sort of socially compartmentalize their various experiences.

                    End up in the right categories and you don’t really have to worry. Companies will throw free cellphones at you just for breathing. End up in the wrong categories, and you’re going to have to struggle against a system that’s built to keep you from getting back up.

                    We can spend eternity playing with the categories, moving around between them or building or diminishing their relative social power. We can change the criteria that we categorize people by, or try to keep them the same. But in the end we’re not really going to make much forward progress until we let go of thinking we know the potential of every human being at a glance. We don’t.

                    What we can do though is be patient, speak our minds honestly, set boundaries, allow others their own autonomy, and try to help ourselves and other humans open up and grow rather than close off and shrink.

                    In any case, the world is complex. It’s silly to try to boil it down into absolutist binaries. It’s also probably really bad for your cortisol levels.

                • I wasn’t making any judgement on this, although if I were, I would point out that one of the benefits of open source is the ability to fork projects and move away from the elements you have a philosophical issue with, such as what the OpenOffice developers did when Oracle purchased Sun and started imposing their unplayable rules. What I was half-jokingly pointing out was some guy coming in deep into the conversation of highly opinionated people and acting like the conversation wasn’t about their various opinions.

                  •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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                    42 days ago

                    People talk about forking open source projects as if you just push a button and it happens on its own. I mean, okay, that’s the first step, but maintaining an repo is a whole thing. Saying ‘well just fork it then’ is only a viable solution if you have the the means, the time, and the inclination. It isn’t really an exclusive alternative to criticism, but another, much narrower, potential additional path.

                    It would certainly be good if people would fork all the useful projects made by devs who are interested in promoting social conservatism masquerading as ‘apolitical actions’ that attempt to reinforce the existing status quo of power. I’m not sure how likely it is, though. Certainly less so than bringing criticism to the table.

    •  LukeZaz   ( @LukeZaz@beehaw.org ) 
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      212 days ago

      I’ve no love lost for the developers in question. But between the original two PRs and associated comments being from over three years ago, and the “trans woman [being called] 'spam” comment being said about a PR that seems pretty strongly to me to be meant as a sarcastic insult rather than a genuine contribution, I can’t help but find it a little unconvincing.

      It’s not without merit by far. I feel that Kling’s blog post not addressing the drama was in poor taste and may indicate a lack of self-improvement regarding the initial fuckup, and saying you want to “avoid alienating people” when closing a PR that aims to improve inclusivity is more than a little pathetic. I also understand not wanting bigots to be able to just bury their past and pretend they were never bigoted. It’s just that the fiery response this has gotten still ends up feeling a bit disproportionate given how old the truly insulting issues were. Am I missing something?

        •  LukeZaz   ( @LukeZaz@beehaw.org ) 
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          I saw that one. It’s what I was referring to when I said “saying you want to ‘avoid alienating people’ when closing a PR that aims to improve inclusivity is more than a little pathetic.” Criticizing the maintainer response there was one of the good parts of the blog post.

          But the outcome of that doesn’t really much change the fact that the sarcastic PR was sarcastic, and thus calling that PR spam is reasonable, whereas claiming they called the trans woman herself spam is not. To be clear, however: I’ve no issue with the sarcastic PR itself, only the framing of it in the blog post.

    • I wonder why that person decided to stir drama now. I guess they must’ve been upset after Ladybird got a good amount of investment money or something?

      Seems like a lot of exaggerated claims of malice to me, even for Github drama. Assuming someone is transphobic for closing a trans person’s PR quite the stretch.

      •  masterspace   ( @masterspace@lemmy.ca ) 
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        Didn’t they fly off the handle on someone for politely pointing out that the text shouldn’t use the word “he” and assume that every user is male?

        That’s not political, thats flat out unprofessional. I would think it’s a pretty junior mistake if any of my colleagues filed a non-gender neutral PR in the first place, and would flat out fire them if they ever reacted to a review that unprofessionally.

        • I found both sides rather aggressive to be honest. The implication that the use of “he” implies that the author assumes every user is male comes with an implied accusation of some form of misogyny. The aggressive defence again at the implication went too far, but the implication of malice was unnecessary, especially for an unknown outsider butting in.

          Furthermore, the “generic he” has also been acceptable English for centuries, and has only been starting to be phased out in the past few decades. In high school, some of my English study materials still came from thirty years before, and certainly didn’t contain gender neutral words like “postperson”. Singular “they” may have been around since the 14th century but that doesn’t mean it was commonplace. My native language doesn’t have an equivalent for the singular they, so I’ll probably use “he” in wrong places. Accusing me of not considering female users because I’m not a native English speaker certainly won’t make me want to help you (though I’d probably just ignore you rather than shut you down; then again, I’m not recovering from substance addiction like the original author was back in the day, so that’s not hard for me to do).

          •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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            I mean, the whole point is kind of that the problem is getting defensive rather than making a change.

            That’s the root of a lot of these problems. People are intimidated by ‘wokeness’ because they think that caring about how they affect other people means that if they have the wrong idea they’re irredeemable. Clearly that isn’t compatible with continuing to feel alright about themselves, so they become defensive and double down. But the reality is, if they’d just like, quit it with the callousness and cruelty they’d be eliminating the problem to begin with.

            Lack of acknowledgement of there being an issue becomes the primary motivator for making the issue worse.

            It’s like becoming a hoarder because you’re too embarrassed to acknowledge what a mess your house is to clean it. Rather than pick the trash up off the floor, they shout about how clean their house really is and how deluded we all are for talking about the smell.

          • I found both sides rather aggressive to be honest. The implication that the use of “he” implies that the author assumes every user is male comes with an implied accusation of some form of misogyny.

            No, it didn’t. Go read the PR, it’s extremely polite. I in fact, would challenge you to try and think of a more polite and less accusatory way of bringing up the same issue. I can’t.

            Furthermore, the “generic he” has also been acceptable English for centuries, and has only been starting to be phased out in the past few decades.

            Yeah, you know what else has only been around for the past “few” decades? Literally every single computer and piece of software ever made, you know what literally none of them do? Refer to their users as “he”.

            You want to make it sound like it’s a simple ESL mistake? That’s fine you’re welcome to believe that, but do you know how I respond to translation mistakes when I’m speaking a foreign language? I laugh and say oops, sorry, my mistake I’ll fix that. I don’t say “don’t bring your politics into this”.

            I’m sorry but you are making up a fantasy to try and believe that the author wasn’t being an explicit asshole.

          • I found both sides rather aggressive to be honest.

            This was what I thought as well. The PR was a simple request that I thought wasn’t political at all, just a matter of inclusion which I thought fit. Kling got aggressive thinking it was a political move or some shit then the rest piled on calling him names and such.

            I think he just thought it was bringing politics into his project, I don’t think he was taking any sides at all but people made up their minds. His silence is a bit concerning, probably ignoring it all but, whatever, It’s his project.

          •  masterspace   ( @masterspace@lemmy.ca ) 
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            There are a million and one ways to phrase everything in the English language, it’s flexibility is one of its most notable features. There is literally no instruction or label that requires non gender neutral language to be in it unless you’re talking explicitly about gender.

            Go ahead and name a label or instruction that you think requires you to use the word he and doesn’t have a gender neutral equivalent.

              • SIngular they never fell out of usage, but it was considered non-standard English dialect for about three hundred years. Standard formal grammar rules from the 18th century until the last quarter of the 20th defaulted to he/him where gender was unknown or irrelevant. Singular they was grudgingly accepted as standard about ten years ago. Until then, every major style guide forbade singular they in favor of “he or she” or recasting the sentence to avoid pronouns altogether or to semantically justify plural they. Other languages have either found their own solutions or decided that their traditions are good enough and kept them.

                Personally, I just avoid pronouns whenever possible, especially if someone is likely to throw a tantrum over an honest mistake due to a lifetime of custom. I’ve never been particularly upset at singular they, but I also don’t take offense if someone follows the older formal grammar rules either.

      •  Recant   ( @Recant@beehaw.org ) OP
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        303 days ago

        The piece was definitely slanted.

        Was what the devs did great? No. Does the whole project need to be outcast/abandoned due to what language they use? No. There needs to be nuance with these issues. Open source does not owe individuals anything and that is why it is provided without warranty. On the flip side, individuals can choose not to use it.

        We should be promoting open source software and not have infighting when open source software doesn’t have much mass market appeal to begin with.

        • We should be promoting open source software and not have infighting when open source software doesn’t have much mass market appeal to begin with.

          Just as a side note, I want open source software / free software to have appeal because it is good for people. If the way the promote it to the masses is enabling awful people, I’m really not interested anymore.

        • Letting fascists loose on github doesn’t make open source software more appealing. Look at how much worse twitter is to be on after relaxing the moderation standards. Now imagine that for open source. We need to make sure open source is approachable to everyone and that means being careful with our language and not being dismissive when someone opens a PR to make the language more approachable to all

          •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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            Absolutely this. Twitter-level toxicity coming out in this thread from outside instances is already a bad indicator of the kind of communities that are peripheral to open source.

          • That is literally the comment that started all of this. Prepare to be convicted and sentenced in the court of public opinion.

            I am serious, the only comment by the dev in question was “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”

            • Non-technical is not the same as political, not even close. I explicitly chose that term because it’s not considered subjective by anyone, but especially not by the people who think gender-neutrality is somehow NOT political. If you claim that it is, they just quip back with “a person’s right to exist is not a political issue but a human rights one”, which of course was never even the debate, they just twist things around to fit their narrative.

              • I explicitly chose that term because it’s not considered subjective by anyone, but especially not by the people who think gender-neutrality is somehow NOT political.

                All words are subjective. “Non-technical” is not really the magic word you think it is. Could you clearly define it? I can’t personally.

      • No, I’m actually with them on that one. The he / they issue in of itself is tiny, I agree, and if they’d just changed it from gendered to gender neutral language then nobody would’ve even cared. Most of us tend to write in a gendered way out of habit or because we think about our own gender, and in a casual conversation that isn’t that important. But this is about a piece of software that, surely, is not just meant for male audiences. It’s just unprofessional to address someone as male by default. Most importantly though, being this stubborn on having the user specifically male is just a weird hill to die on, but even weirder if that particular action is the one that is actually causing the drama - which they allegedly claim wanting to prevent by dismissing “politics”. And I’m sorry, but changing a “he” to “they” is not politics, it’s just including non male users. Nothing more, nothing less. So why is it such an issue to not just address specifically male users? It really only would be because those people hold some very questionable views, which, in my opinion, clash heavily with the whole concept of free and open source software, which is supposedly for everyone. So if your actions and views are this flawed, how can you be trusted on such an important project?

        Also, in regards to this news… “no code from rivals” also is just a stupid thing to say and do. There’s plenty of good open source code that they could and probably even SHOULD use. But whatever. I’m not gonna support this project and predict it will fail anyway.

        • The thing is, as some other people have pointed out, the guy is not a native english speaker, and many latin based languages simply don’t have any gender neutral pronoun and make use of the neutral masculine instead. Many of these languages have seen some people propose new ways to handle pronouns to change that recently, most of which are somewhat controversial. It’s easy for a native speaker of those languages to assume the same is true in english (especially since the use of “he” as a generic neutral is, as far as I can tell, still valid, although clearly out of fashion). Once you take all of that into account, the proposed change can easily be viewed as someone trying to simply push one of those controversial ideas instead of a widely accepted generic masculine, which would clearly fall into politics in the sense of “real world beliefs and social issues irrelevant to the topic at hand”. The rest seems to simply be a pretty childish ego war between him and some mastodon users which could have been solved by either side taking 5 minutes to explain their point of view on this matter.

          Now, even without this context, from what I can tell, the issue at hand was a single instance of " he" used to describe a generic anonymous user in the dev VM… Seeing that as unprofessional because it addresses someone as male by default surely is a bit of a stretch.

          About that “no code for rivals”, I don’t think is as stupid as many mention. Right now when it comes to web browsers (at least ones with wide compatiblility and features), there’s only 2 choices : chromium-based and firefox. So someone trying to bring some fresh blood is welcome, and in order to avoid having the same issues as the chromium-based ones, you need to make sure you are not overly dependent of your competitor’s code. Granted, this is a pretty strict approach, but it doesn’t prevent them from using the same libraries and techs, it just means that any code written specifically for a different browser shouldn’t be copy/pasted.

          •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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            52 days ago

            Nothing about being a non-native English speaker requires you to stubbornly continue to use specific language. I have many non-native English speaking friends. Generally they actually want to know how their words are being taken, and will make corrections to be sure they’re not saying the wrong thing.

            You know, like, as one does when learning another language. I’m not going to insist on using English grammar rules while speaking Spanish and then just tell all the Spanish speakers to stop being so political at me when they correct me. That’s nonsense.

      • And then another, where a trans woman is called “spam.”

        With comments like this it’s clear the author is just overreacting. They were clearly calling the PR spam, not the person. (And this is coming from someone who was definitely angry with them for denying the original PRs and stuff.)

    • “reactionary”. Self-aware much?

      I do not know either of you.

      That said, on the one hand we have a guy that trivial research reveals has been dramatically transparent about his own life, struggles, and frailty in a really humble and disarming way. He shares his talent freely not only with code but mentorship and teaching. He has created a thriving and closer-knit community working together to do interesting and valuable things ( OS and browser ). His somewhat famous tagline is “well, hello friends”. He has also showcased both his wife and other females on his channel. Unless I misunderstand the term “incel”, you are demonstrably and factually wrong on that front at least. The biggest complaint I could find about him elsewhere is that his is “too neutral”. Perhaps that is at play here.

      On the other hand, we have somebody directly peddling destruction, slander, and hate ( you ). And why? As far as I can tell, the only contribution the SerenityOS founder has made to this “discussion” is the sentence “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”. Is that really it? Overreaction?

      That sentence spawned all of this? I must have misunderstood which of you we were labelling as “reactionary”.

      Regardless of if the project should have accepted the commit or not ( a valid debate ), I cannot possibly side with this reaction. It is awful.

      Downvotes welcome. I would rather be ethical than popular.

      • his wife and other females

        His wife and other women. The word “female” is an adjective and should not be used as a noun unless referring to e.g. animals. Like myself, you are (probably) non-native speaker of English so I don’t weigh this all too heavy, but others might since it is considered somewhat disrespectful to women.

      • You’re wasting your breath. These people cannot be defeated with logic. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t use reason to get into in the first place.

        At the very least they will claim “gender neutrality and/or a person’s right to exist is not an ethical OR political issue.”

    •  Luci   ( @Luci@lemmy.ca ) 
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      153 days ago

      Oh didn’t you hear? It’s fine now because a PR was finally accepted well after being called out and stepping down stepping aside from the project

      /s

      • Teaching changing minds, influencing… it needs plenty of repeating and sleeping on things. To be fair, when all else fails applying pressure has its place as well. Nevertheless small victories are still victories.

        The ability of Ladybird’s team to face scrutiny of all kinds is important for them to eventually gain traction in the browser market. But I’m still hopeful, and we need more options.