Sorry if this is off topic, I don’t mean to stir a shitstorm. I just seem to hear barbs about Pixelfed developer dansup’s online behaviour every now and then, but no one ever comes out and make clear what the trouble is.
I guess it’s a legitimate complaint that he holds out on open sourcing projects, and keeps them close to his chest rather than distributing workloads. Given he’s currently developing Pixelfed and Loops and a messenger called Sup, I can understand the worry that he’ll hit a figurative wall and take all projects down with him…
So I found this open letter just now as I were trying to get to the bottom of it, and I genuinely can’t tell if this is what people have been growling about?
The above link is to the “appendix” where the anonymous authors appear to show receipts for the behaviour they flag. In shorter form, from the letter itself:
dansup, the maintainer of Pixelfed, Loops (which NLnet helps fund), and FediDB, among others, is a dangerous force in the fediverse community. With a follower count of over 22 thousand, he has repeatedly shown himself to be hostile to fellow FOSS fediverse developers, have a lack of care for open-sourcing his work, and be in favour of injecting the fediverse with advertisements. He has also proved himself to be prone to conspiratorial thinking, regrettable public statements, and embarrassingly public meltdowns.
Somebody tell me what is going on here?
[edited for typos]
While we do Drama about [Insert open source developper name here] we have open and closeted nazi owning social media and big software companies. So I think we should better focus on them than on whatever Drama in the FOSS world
Eh, the open source community can worry about the open source community. Those other things don’t mean we have to put on horse blinders to others bringing awareness. No need to be dismissive.
True. But we are not the open source community. And the fediverse is not inherently open source by nature. ActivityPub is designed to be used by anyone.
FOSS is a big part of the fediverse. Doesn’t mean everything in fediverse is or has to… BUT it means it is very relevant to discuss.
Huh?
Is this not relevant, since this person is a linchpin in creating federated alternatives to those social media sites? And if he fails he drags them all down.
You both have fair points, but I favour taking the broad view rather than hyperfocusing on one single, worst of class supervillain. We can do both.