Meanwhile if you step into the Arch forums you have like ONE moderator with the DBZ avatar that rules with an iron fist and I for one applaud them for it.
That's not good. After the latest NixCon I thought the community and the governance structure were relatively balanced and mostly in agreement. It seems I was mistaken...
I kinda like most people both in the SC and the moderation team, it's sad to see them disagree to this extent. I guess the "political appointment" was a right-wing one? I think the mod team were doing some good work keeping the discussion LGBT-friendly and not allowing most hateful views to be expressed, which apparently counts as left-wing nowadays.
Kind of hard to tell without seeing the actual mod decisions. But usually these things are super opaque and the official discussions are super vague so it pretty much is he said she said.
That said, this is definitely waaay better than the vaguebooking that the Rust mod team did when they quit.
Another day, another controversy in the nix community 🤣 It has always been this way and IMO a major reason it just has little velocity. The focus of community seems to be moral and ethical discussions about opensource and software as a whole, and honestly just basically everything outside of the software development lifecycle.
My guess as to why anything moves forward at all is because there are more contributors who don't participate in the discussions than those that do. If they implemented a rule to keep it focused on nix and NixOS and nothing else, it might make it a nicer place to be.
It's the same controversy as it was last year and the year before that: should the military-industrial complex be allowed to benefit from the Nix commons? It's disappointing that you don't think that the ethics of our profession is worth more than the output of our labor, particularly when it comes to exploitation, mass surveillance, war, and genocide.
Most of us write flakes outside of nixpkgs. I'm still listed as a maintainer and get pinged, but I don't really care; anything I care about is already being actively developed out-of-tree. I doubt I'm the only maintainer taking that sort of quiet-quitting path.
This is why i love flakes. Can finally position the beast of nixpkgs!
Could you share some links to the discussion? How would they even prevent those organisations from gaining access?
Honestly the one Linux community that has been the nicest and most helpful for me has been the NixOS one...but I don't use the official channels. I tried but like you said it seemed to be anything and everything EXCEPT actual Nix and NixOS.
outside of that your average NixOS user has been a pleasant experience to deal with.
I feel like at some point we have to drop most "official" spaces and instead have a bunch of separate sub-communities all moderated separately, zig-style. The only official communication channels would be PR and issue discussions on Nix and Nixpkgs repos, and they can be tightly moderated to stay on-topic.
This is why I'm not online 24/7.