Volunteering to be the maintainer

Posted Apr 4, 2024 23:13 UTC (Thu) by rra (subscriber, #99804)
In reply to: Volunteering to be the maintainer by NYKevin
Parent article: Free software's not-so-eXZellent adventure

> Ideally, people complaining about a lack of activity would be disregarded as background noise, so Collin would have felt less pressure to add a maintainer.

This is a somewhat GitHub-specific point, but since for a long time I didn't realize this option existed, maybe other people don't as well.

If you go into your personal settings on GitHub, and then expand Moderation on the left sidebar, there is a tab called Blocked Users. If you go there, you can block a GitHub account from all of your repositories. This prevents them from opening issues, PRs, interacting on issues, etc. You can also ask GitHub to warn you if any repository you interact with has prior commits from that user.

I haven't checked whether GitLab and other forges have a similar feature. Hopefully so.

People in free software, perhaps due to the Geek Social Fallacies, often seem too reluctant to simply ban people. If I saw even half of the type of malicious attempted bullying in the two bugs referenced earlier in this thread on a project I maintain, I hope that I would have been willing to just ban the user and move on. In fact, I have already proactively banned the two worst offenders in those bugs from all of my repositories, and I recommend others consider doing the same when they see someone behave egregiously, even on repositories they aren't involved in.

It's mentally hard to be subjected to constant ongoing harassment and tell yourself that you should just ignore it. Let the software do it for you.

Volunteering to be the maintainer

Posted Apr 7, 2024 20:26 UTC (Sun) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (5 responses)

When you allow bans, people get banned incorrectly and this is just as frustrating on the other end. Allowing arbitrary bans is probably a different social fallacy. It fails closed instead of failing open, and it's not clear that's much better in some cases.

Recently, I personally noticed that an executive at one of the big OSS foundations happened to also be a racial supremacist (noncontroversially - he basically said "kill all the $people" many times). I did what seemed sensible, and went to a group that seemed equipped to have software politics and said "hey, I noticed this thing, what's the right response?" Because the wrong people were online at the time and in a bad mood, I am now permanently banned from talking to anyone there or reading any messages.

Volunteering to be the maintainer

Posted Apr 7, 2024 20:47 UTC (Sun) by atnot (guest, #124910) [Link] (1 responses)

Based on the how deliberately obtuse you're being about who "$people" are here, I'm just going to assume that they probably made a good call there.

And also failing closed is actually a very good thing. Not only for the safety of the community, but because the contributions of any one bad or abusive person are without exception severely outweighed by the amount of people they put off from joining the project. If anything in my experience we're not banning enough.

Volunteering to be the maintainer

Posted Apr 8, 2024 7:00 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Not mentioning the specific class of people $asshat wants killed isn't being obtuse, much less deliberately.

It's about highlighting the fact that it doesn't matter which people are his (I assume) problem, or whether the subcategory in question is racial or sexual or environmental or whatnot.

Last but not least, it's about not risking triggering a side discussion about $people here.

Volunteering to be the maintainer

Posted Apr 8, 2024 16:07 UTC (Mon) by rra (subscriber, #99804) [Link] (2 responses)

> When you allow bans, people get banned incorrectly and this is just as frustrating on the other end.

This is exactly the type of social fallacy (and, frankly, entitlement) that I'm decrying. It does not matter whether you're frustrated about being banned. The scarce resource here is maintainer time and energy, not the frustration level of random people on the Internet. If I don't find someone's communication productive and I haven't agreed to some sort of relationship with them (being formal members of the same project, for example), I am under precisely no obligation to communicate with them as a free software maintainer.

In other words, I do not care in the slightest whether the people who are banned find that frustrating, and, in my opinion, neither should anyone else who is in the maintainer's position. Caring what annoying people think about you or your project is a losing game. Block them and move on. There are more helpful, productive, and positive interactions about free software than one can do justice to in a lifetime. Dropping communication with people the first time they seriously annoy you will free up so much time to do more useful things, will do wonders for your mood, and nothing irreplaceable will be lost.

You do not owe random people on the Internet a debate. Even if they're right!

Volunteering to be the maintainer

Posted Apr 9, 2024 10:17 UTC (Tue) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (1 responses)

Certainly I'm not entitled to talk to people who don't want to listen. However:

- such a ban has a collateral effect as people who do want to listen aren't allowed to listen and often aren't even aware they're not allowed to listen.
- as a society we should probably value rightness, not be indifferent to it.

Volunteering to be the maintainer

Posted Apr 9, 2024 11:15 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

You seem to be mixing up two sorts of bans:

A ban that happens simply because you tried to observe but not speak.
A ban that happens after you spoke in a disruptive fashion.

Most, if not all, open source projects don't ban you from observing public forums; there may be invite-only forums that you're not part of, but as long as you're not speaking, you can listen, although you may need to use a different identity to your normal identity if you've previously been banned for being disruptive (or rely on external logs - e.g. you can use mailing list archives to read a list you're banned from, or a project's IRC log, or Incognito Mode in your browser to read a web forum).

And it is surely right that society excludes disruptive people from areas where they cause issues; society is, in this situation, valuing rightness over ability to disrupt.