cobbles

When I was a little girl, like many other little girls I was told the tale of Red Riding Hood. As I got older we learned more about the meta of the tale.

We updated the tale, found sympathy for the wolf. Sometimes we saw it as a dark romance. Sometimes the wolf and the woodman found love together. Tales change. We update them for our needs. Fairytales are encoded folklore, lost memory encoded for a lesson.

We took the metaphor and considered the woods managed. They became forests. But danger still lurked in our forests and the internet is no different.

We still have the dangers. But the villains of the forest like to chop down the trees, drive fast cars and make money.

Beware the Manosphere

Within a space we have a habit as humans of descending into archetypes. The masculine man, the very feminine woman. Good obedient kids. That hateful old scold telling you what you shouldn't do. She's an evil witch, kill her.

People who are no better than they should be.

Do you recognise these? Do you see yourself in them?

How do you find your community when you don't see a path for you in the world?

Who will welcome you?

Some of us queers (before some of us knew we were queer) went online. We found family and some of us learned how to function in a community and see ourselves as part of a collective rather than an individual. Some folks had done this before us, had organised before us in meatspace. So they brought their experience online as well.

But what about the straights? What about the baby queers who don't know they are queer yet but know somethings different. They are lost.

The Lost Boys

I'm choosing to focus on the straight boys here. The mainstream are focusing on the manosphere of Andrew Tate etc. Although these types have always been online. The issue is the sheer scale and availability. Because it's not just about searching, it's about what our addictive websites and apps serve. In service of the algorithm.

So we have a bunch of lost directionless young men, who've been brought up on the idea of the nuclear household. 2.4 Children, go to university, marry, have kids. Be successful.

But our social contract has been broken, with boys and young men feeling very isolated with some very stark prospects of debt. There aren't the youth clubs anymore, furnishing social activities. The church (the other source of local community clubs) is shrinking. The pandemic has also shrunk the social sphere. Although the issue of the manosphere was a concern for a lot longer than that. We've always had toxic abusers on the internet who are good at building up a cult. Which is what this is. A cult with a bunch of devotees. Who started out wanting to improve themselves and looking for community.

'Some of what pulls Men towards the manosphere, is a search for connection and a sense of belonging and meaning,' says David Bartless of Equimundo. A sense of belonging that is lacking elsewhere. [1]

Like I said, looking for community. When I was growing up in my small village we had a community centre with events during the holidays for six up to sixteen. Then the funding got cut. My Father and Uncles had a very rich community centre life even being working class. Their mothers local church had a film club, there were outward bound events. Because of those my Dad and Uncle went hillwalking and across Rannoch Moor. But they learned about how to do that because of the community clubs.

It's not enough to ban apps, or content. The damage is done. What you need to do as a society is invest in community again. Invest in youth. Bring back grants so that further education is affordable. Invest in community sport beyond football. Expand funding out to the charities that already provide activity clubs. Invest in local hacker spaces and repair cafes.

In order to ensure that the kids don't look for community online, you need to give them something offline.

Our digital poppets

I don't think we can truly lay this at the door of the internet entirely. After all what's on the internet is our physical universe manifested with all of our toxic culture. All the internet does is what our media landscape does. Serve all of this toxicity at scale.

Our ephemeral world, our algorithms serve physical masters who use the data that our digital poppets serve them.

But what are our poppets? ​

Poppets and witchcraft

A poppet is a doll made to represent a person. It's purpose is to cast a spell on them, or help them through magic. They are made, then often hidden.

You could make them from anything, but something from the person the poppet needed to affect was needed. So hair clippings, nail trimmings were attached to the poppet.

There's folklore about being very careful about what you did with your hair and nail trimmings. Folks would bury or burn them so that they couldn't be used against them later. [3]

Digital Poppets

Digital poppets are our digital twins, our advertising profiles on our phones. Our metadata from our browsers with our buying preferences, our Internet addresses we access the web from. It's our browser settings including our accessibility preferences. Our poppets are created from what we put up there, what we send to one another unencrypted. All little pieces of data, which on their own doesn't seem like that much.

Data leaks, data gets sold. What happens when that data is collated together from different sources? When we use google as a login, or various payment providers to pay at different websites.

All that data is our digital clippings and becomes a digital taglock to add to our digital poppets.

With folklore, folks used to be cautious about what to do with hair and nail clippings. As those could give a witch or sorcerer power over you.

We have this now with our electronic clippings, we give our clippings to social networks and that gives a whole heap of power to them and to the buyers of that data who can then analyse it.

There's an analogy for you. – Esther Payne (me) [2]

Digital Puppetry

We know how effective propaganda can be. Humanity is hackable through the meme. It's hackable through our storytelling. We want life to make sense and have a level of control over it. So we are susceptible to propaganda. We have very effective ways to spread this propaganda at scale.

Look at Cambridge Analytica and the Vote Leave campaign. They were able to use targeted ads to Brexit voters as part of a political campaign. Those ads were served everywhere and they weren't always marked as advertisements. They spread through our walled gardens like poison. The poison was also spread and is still being spread across traditional media.

There's nothing particularly special about the internet other than the scale and the personalisation of what can be served to you, thanks to your digital profile. Your digital poppet.

Targeted advertising follows folks around the Internet. It's a harmful part of a complex system. But the harm isn't mythical. Information is leverage, particularly when it's combined with your other information.

Knowledge about a person is power. If knowledge isn't really power, then why are governments threatening E2EE with the Earn IT act. Why do we have to keep fighting against chat control in the EU.

Information applied with targeted analysis is leverage. Your metadata contributes to an organisations' knowledge about you. In various circumstances it can be life threatening to investigative journalists etc. Your digital poppet snitches information about you to all sorts, to hackers, governments and big tech.

That's before we even get to who want's to send you a message and reel you into buying what they sell.

The Manosphere

So we can see what lures in young folks. It's a subculture. We've had sub cultures before. The difference is, how much access young folks are getting. The sheer scale of what's being served to them.

They aren't getting adult supervision, and it's like letting your kids onto the motorways on a balance bike. They don't have the initial training. The cognitive and critical thinking training.

Then we allow them to access this information motorway through a smartphone.

But we also need to remember it's not just the internet to blame for our culture. Gen X came of age having internalised some pretty hetero normal stuff. So did the millennials. We shouldn't be surprised at the grifters telling young folks that “feminism and diversity” has gone too far.

We know that's not true. But when you have a system that depends on objectifying people so that the grift can keep happening a narrative needs to be told. A point of view.

So boys much like girls are taught a fairy tale. Except boys aren't taught to be Disney princes. They are told the fairy tale of masculinity. We're taught it in sitcoms, in our media, with the majority of our politicians. We're taught the average, so there's no space for diversity when you're looking for the norm. Which leaves no space for the rest of us.

As a woman, I struggled under the expectation of dating and being expected to marry and have kids one day. Yet I also wanted a career. The women in my family being working class worked. We couldn't afford to not to. Yet the workplace also didn't have accessibility affordances so one parent couldn't work. We didn't fit the mold. So I get why boys feel they must be doing something wrong. Especially with the lack of opportunity available for young folks.

Folks are taught you must find a wife, marry have kids and life will be complete. So when the social contract is broken, who will young men blame?

The Traditional Roles of the household

However as we've seen in this idea with the “Tradwife” women are objectified reduced to a doll, a servant, expected to service a man's needs. A sexbot, a mother for the children. A confident, a cheerleader, a domestic servant to curate the house and keep it clean. A hostess for dinners. Be his validation. His purpose is to take care of you. Like he takes care of all his possessions.

In return women can just settle in and be taken care of. A man will take care of everything

But what happens when a man's earning potential is damaged? What happens when the man dies. Is there a succession plan? Does another man take over the responsibility for the wife and kids?

I don't think a devotee to the manosphere particularly thinks about that or cares. When you treat women as disposable objects and kids as extensions of yourself, how, or if your woman and kids can survive your death doesn't matter. In extreme cases some men try to take us with them, a la the myth of the Pharaoh's in Egypt taking their servants with them via murder.

A very middle class idea.

Historically and socially, the idea of the trad wife at home is a very specific white idea of the family. This idea is very rooted in white supremacy. It's the Patriarchy. It what defines the middle class from the working class. It's aspiration. It's also not realistic. It's another fairy tale.

Both of my Grandparent's working class families had both parents working. The only reason my Grandmother stopped working for a short while was when her local factory closed.

When my Grandfather was killed in a car accident, she had to go back to work. She'd grown up in a family where her father died young at 34. It was the 1930s after all. There was no social safety net.

The dream of the manosphere is a very specific individualistic idea, but it attracts a lot of lonely boys and the addictive nature of app's like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok peddle more of it to make money. That's not to say that what's being peddled to the rest of us is great either.

While the kids are watching their digital poppets get filled in with bits of metadata. So more of these libertarian individualistic ideas get peddled. White supremacy packaged up to be more palatable.

I don't have an answer for what we do about the manosphere, other than advocate for a social safety net offline. Where we aim for Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, Free Education and Free Public Transport. Where we aim for the commons rather than the individual.

It's soulless to chase status for money and a partner. It feels soulless having to work to just survive. It's isolating, but there's a false sense of community. Because you're being told by the cult leader “just do this next thing bro. Just keep going bro. You'll be successful with women, have money like me.”

It's modern folklore with none of the learned wisdom. It's fake.

I'm horrified by the abusive potential of the manosphere and the abuse that's already been done by Tate and his ilk. I'm horrified by the idea of Women's choices being limited, of being negged so much by abusive men that we feel we have no choice.

Which isn't true. Some of us in the past have managed. It's not easy and poverty sucks. There's a reason why the right wing gradually sought to disable the social safety net to help capitalism thrive.

What parts of Folklore to keep?

As I've got older, I stopped believing in faeries. But I work in a world that I access through a screen and keyboard. My world is the unseen. Coders create code, a series of incantations to tell the device of zeros and ones what to do. We have words like daemons, so magics always been a part of my vocabulary.

So perhaps in order for folks outside our fields to understand our world with all of it's risks; we need to update folklore to explain what's happening with our technology and our online spaces. To use the idea of the digital poppet and explain how those poppets have helped to shape our democratic choices. How those poppets have helped to peddle the manosphere to our kids. But also how our mass media plays into that.

Our internet peddles fairytales the same way our folklore used to. To tell the tale of a point of view, how to act. So choose your fairytale wisely. In the old days we used to say don't give your real name out. I've broken that old rule. Our world is built that way so we have to break the rule. But it's also why we need to push back against age verification and ID verification that takes our biometric data. [5]

You have to work really hard on youtube to not get peddled right wing videos. You have to work hard to not see AI slop. Youtube doesn't really do moderation. You can't block content creators.

But this has always been the case. Free Speech without Free Association in safety. No techbro ever considers the right of Free Association. Or the other Human Rights listed in the UDHR, if they did, they'd never use github. [6],[7]

It's why the Fediverse is important, although even then, there will be a bastion of the manosphere somewhere on the Fediverse. If not now, give it time. How we build our online communities and how we build our tech is determined by the political ideals of the builders.

At least with the Fediverse we do have other options, with developers who do care about these sorts of things. [8]

The idea that information must be free for everyone to take part in and consumer is the mainstay of the internet. But within our physical community spaces there are rules. So we must consider when we build our online communities what our tools are. We must consider how do we enable boundaries? We must consider consent and what we do with our community members data.

Remember the old ways. It's a dark forest out there.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/oct/21/why-the-manosphere-clicked-for-young-men-a-visual-deep-dive

[2] https://chaos.social/@onepict/107780763058678202

[3] https://magickalspot.com/taglock/

[4] https://dotart.blog/cobbles/defiance

[5] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/06/28/yet-another-id-verification-service-breached-exposing-private-info-collected-on-behalf-of-uber-tiktok-more/

[6] https://www.ohchr.org/en/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

[7] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/9/20906605/github-ice-contract-immigration-ice-dan-friedman

[8] https://freefediverse.org/index.php/Main_Page

A recent Guardian Article about far right groups in the UK growing on Facebook got me thinking. Reading some of the comments published reminded me of the undercurrent I grew up with in my childhood village. [1]

I grew up reading body language, before I could talk I could mimic. I'd had to learn that language because of my household. Outside that household as I started to walk and talk I'd see folks attitude to my disabled parent and my family.

I grew up watching ableism. I knew some folks didn't think my parent should have been allowed to have me. They also couldn't understand why my non disabled parent loved that disabled parent. There were occasions when my disabled parent would be upset over something someone had said about them, and about me.

Plus being a small child, you'd be amazed at how folks either don't notice you are there, or think that you won't understand what they mean. I could read Arthur Conan Doyle at nine years old and I'd been reading childrens novels from the age of six. I could read silently really well, reading out loud not as well, but I could understand language. I loved reading and devoured books.

When adults think that you must be developmentally backward in someway (because of a disabled parent) you'd be appalled at what's said around you.

I'd ask my non disabled parent, and that parent did their best to explain to the letter and no further. But I grew up knowing some folks didn't think I should exist and they were surprised I wasn't disabled in some way. I knew that some folks felt my family were wrong. Our family was othered.

Before I knew the word Eugenics, the meaning was made clear. My existence was not approved of. Some folks if they'd had their way would have ensured my disabled parent would have been sterilised. So I grew up with a politicised existence. Not as politicised as some, as when I moved away, as I went to a new high school then university, no one knew I had a disabled parent (by that point in time two disabled parents) unless I told them.

I'm cis, white and fairly privileged. Doesn't change the fact I grew up in a small village with folks who were ableist and in some rare cases Eugenicist. Long COVID has shown me, that I'm being very generous, there's more eugenicists in my groups both professional and personal than I thought.

Folks are shocked at MAGA and Reform rising in popularity. I was shocked with Brexit. But I'd been ignoring a very inconvenient truth. Many folks always supported those kind of parties.

They were waiting for permission for their racism and ableism to be spoken about openly. We facilitated that speech while ignoring the right of free association in safety.

Very often privileged folks, particularly in FOSS do not choose to understand why someone's existence may be political.

There's a discomfort when those of us who grew up learning this the hard way, point this out. There's a discomfort when we state our boundaries. Some folks find the sudden discomfort of empathy and guilt is hard. So you lash out.

Privileged folks can't tolerate discomfort. Whereas for the rest of us it's a walk in a shitty, obstacle laden park and we'd like to clean it up. But your comfort just can't tolerate the huge piles of shit that you helped to pile up over our paths. It hits us just as hard. But we've not had the privilege of being able to ignore it, we've not stepped on others so we didn't get shit on our shoes.

Suddenly we aren't presenting our backs for you to step on. We refuse to enable your comfort. So there's backlash against DEI and as Fatma Aydemir points out in the Guardian it's not fatigue it's strategy. [2]

We can see it in DHH and Palmer Luckers salivation over the resignation of most of the Moderation Team in NixOS. We can see it in folks characterisation of empathy for others and making accessibility affordances as “the woke mind virus”. [3]

Folks, these men are rich. If they get disabled, they will still have the comfort of the world around them. They don't care if you get laid off. They won't pay your families medical bills and you are one bad accident or infection away from life ruination and struggle. It's why so many of us poor disabled folk know that the only way forward is to find that empathy. To help others where we can. To spread the idea of mutual aid, and when we can help each other. You'll fundraise for Blue and then wonder why the rest of us won't vote for your status quo.

We knew how shit the world could get. You'd have a better world investing in your local community and community fridges and free libraries. Not expecting the Democrats and Labour to look after you. They've been captured by the corps, it's the nature of a centralised democracy when the population doesn't exercise it's right to protest or actively care about politics. It's what happens when you consistently vote for the least worst option. That's not democracy.

As we've said in our presentation at Fluconf, “Our values demand sacrifices.” My father gave up his career and comfort to ensure my brother and I could heal. He's very proud of what we both try to do within our communities. [4]

Some folks are scared of protesting and losing that livelihood, because they know no one will help them. This is how we become divided. This is how tyranny grows and we become isolated and alone. So how do we counter this?

You need to find your folks. You need to start learning the idea of community and cooperation. It's not always about what concrete work someone can do. Sometimes it's the person who manages to stop a dispute and just does lots of small background stuff. You'll never see them. But they work hard.

You need to reach out to your small groups and see where you can help. Even if it's the local community and helping out by doing a pot luck. Get to know your community. Learn and listen.

Protest movements grow because people band together and are prepared to support those folks who protest. People love to quote the first they came for poem. But the thing that they appear to miss is the community aspect. Fascists are good at dividing people. It's a lot harder to go to gatherings and break bread. To learn about other folks and be open to getting it wrong but being gently corrected. Yes it hurts when you realise you have offended someone, but rather than say they were wrong, you must sit on that discomfort. You will feel discomfort from time to time, because to err is human. Most folks will be forgiving, but not if you take out your pain on them.

That discomfort means your empathy is growing. Much like when muscles tear. It will get stronger if you work on it.

Communities will support one another, will hide people from the authorities. I'm literally only alive because a local community resisted the Nazi's and hid my Grandfather. He in turn helped others out of France, including a vulnerable family.

My other Grandfather was a trade unionist. He went on strike. When you go on strike you rely on the rest of your community to help you out with shelter and food. Folks banded together so that rent got paid. Thatcher didn't just break the unions, she broke the community around them. That's how Capitalism works, it needs for you to focus on the nine to five so you're too scared of falling as no one will catch you. It's why the social safety net has been systematically destroyed.

Mutual aid is so much more than just begging for cash. It's a recognition of community and support. In person in a local community it's literally feeding other folks kids. We were poor growing up, but my father always made sure there was space at our table for visiting friends.

Instead we are isolated in our fear and discomfort. Those of us on the left are used to fear, used to being mistreated. Examine your own discomfort and start listening. We will be suspicious, we can see your discomfort. But you need to do the work.

You will have the heartbreak of realising that your friends and colleagues will never have your back even as they say pretty words of ally-ship. So you cannot compromise, your values demand sacrifices.

If you've read through this, you've started. Sit on the discomfort for a while and then read some more.

We'll be waiting, breaking bread together, supporting each other.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/sep/28/inside-the-everyday-facebook-networks-where-far-right-ideas-grow

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/30/germany-anti-diversity-backlash-trump-afd

[3] https://devinprater.micro.blog/2025/08/13/beyond-parity-the-case-for.html

[4] https://librecast.net/fluconf-2025/

There's a freeze that happens when you witness atrocity from a distance. We're watching a real time genocide happening on the Gaza Strip while the IDF makes the argument that the civilians they kill deserved it somehow.

It reminds me of the excuse that Prosecuting Lawyers worried that the defence of my Grandfathers Gestapo torturer might make during the Post war prosecution of war criminals.

From the Affidavit it appears that Private SMITH, when captured, was wearing civilian clothes. This may be put forward as a defence by the accused and as justifying SMITH to be treated as a spy. Whatever the circumstances of the case, treatment such as is set out above can of course never be justified, and there appears to be no defence whatever.

In the historical archives of the UN you can read about the testimony my grandfather made.

My Grandfather was working with the British Underground in France during 1941 helping Airmen, Captured troops and a vulnerable family leave during the six trips he made to Marseilles as a passeur/helper. When he was captured he was then tortured for what he knew and then shipped off to several of the German Arbeitan Penal camps. He met the civilians who helped him in France in the Camps again after they had been betrayed by Harold Cole.

He never knew why he survived and those civilians were executed. But the underground was funded by locals, the British Government and some rich benefactors.

Resistance tends to need help from outside a country as much as inside. Resistance often is transnational.

Fast forward to now, and we see people trapped in Gaza. To help those folks political and economic pressure is needed.

Meanwhile a Labour Government is pushing the courts to lock up protesters who support Palestine action. Let's be clear here. Labour has long been captured by Capitalism, it's stepped away from the roots of socialism decades ago under New Labour.

The trappings of government with the need for negotiation with the entrenched political classes that inhabited Westminster has changed the party. It's the moving target of the “center” which means placating the right. Ignoring Human Rights. We have normalised the Far Right. This didn't happen overnight. The Far Right never went away. They just hid their views under a thin veneer of “civility”. We gave them permission with the idea of “balance.” Our media organisations ignored Karl Popper. So the center gradually moved, because of the fear of the left. Plus the fear of the funding cut, the loss of advertising. Eyes on content mattered.

The trappings of a Zombie empire, made up of an aristocracy where the only membership you ever needed was generational power. Wealth is just a store of that power. But they told us the lie of Thatcherism and New Labour continued it. Yes the working classes moved up, some of us became middle class. But we fell for the shell game. Our wealth isn't generational, so the only power we can have is the power we share. The aristocracy, the billionaires won't share it with us.

There's a reason why authoritarian regimes often have a very close relationship with industrialists, with the Tech Barons. It's all about the money, but the money's just a store for power.

We're complicit in this when we look down on striking. We look down on the folks who point out the hard truth. We are complicit as we look down on those who are less fortunate as somehow lesser. Not deserving of our help or compassion. It's what fuels anti immigration, ableism. It's the desire to not stick out, so you don't give that helping hand.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. – Hannah Arendt The Life of the Mind

I see our bonds tightening around us so slowly. I started to see the bonds with the G8 protests in 2003. But the bonds started to tighten much earlier with that, when Thatcher broke the Unions. When the poll tax riots forced a policy rethink.

We became complacent. We allowed the kettling. We allowed a Government to ignore a million people marching against the invasion of Iraq, when we should have joined the marchers.

Between Labour Governments, we allowed the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to use the excuse of Austerity to cut the benefits of disabled people. We are means testing the elderly with arbitrary limits, when they've been frugal. We need Universal Basic Income, but we're kept obedient by rising food and electricity prices. We keep our heads down and hope we don't get laid off. We allowed the social safety net to be taken away from us and turned inward.

We're watching as one of the architects of New Labour is thinking about how to carve up Gaza. Stealing Land, allowing people to be starved to death. Yet again allowing an invasion to serve Capital.

A Labour Government is locking people up for protesting this. These protests will not be the only time. Anytime we wish to protest for human rights there will be a danger of prosecution, of state violence. So anyone with dependents, who's income is precarious will be rightly terrified of taking part in protests.

So any Government can gradually tighten the bonds on us. With no come back, to protest will be criminal. No matter how much state violence is enacted against us. The violence of authoritarianism. Make no mistake, we are captured now. Some of us are just out on day release. Don't make a fuss, otherwise your life will be ruined. We're isolated from each other, so we feel powerless. We have no support structure, no community safety net. No one is coming to save us. So we must find a way to build community support to save each other.

Fear keeps us in line. So at what point do we resist? The longer we leave it, the harder it will be to resist.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. – Victor Frankl

Our values demand sacrifice. How long do we leave off resisting before we must sacrifice everything to defend the human rights of others? Our humanity demands our care, our acknowledgement that authoritarian regimes are humanities enemy. Those regimes are a threat to us because they threaten our human rights by ignoring the human rights of those they deem as “enemies.”

We often flirt with the idea of the heroism of resistance. We romanticise the escape lines. We imagine a long journey sneaking through the forests of France and over the mountains. Which some of it was. But a lot of it was guiding escapees onto trains, hiding in plain sight under the eyes of Nazi's and French officials alike.

The very nature of resistance must be flexible. Sometimes it's loud protest. But sometimes, resistance is giving shelter. Sometimes resistance is hiding the existence of the vulnerable. Sometimes resistance is loudly protecting them. It depends.

But we must always try to resist authoritarianism. We can call it by different names in our history. But the Nazi's, the British Empire, Stalin, and all the others can be reduced down to their real ideals. Authoritarianism. Tyranny.

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. [...]

Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

• Nemicks Manifesto – Andor Season 1 – Tony Gilroy [1]

Authoritarians want us to be so overwhelmed that we just look for the quiet life. They want us cowed, authoritarians want us to be afraid. Willing to just work for a pittance, while they pillage our cultures and our peace of mind.

To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

The Great Dictator Speech – Charlie Chaplin [2]

The way to start is to find solidarity with each other. To help others, to hold the hand out when they can't get up. To give mutual aid, to shelter others and ensure they are fed. The politics of the status quo may have failed us. But the past fifty years were never about the people. You need to start by recognising the humanity in the poor, the ignorant. Recognise the Humanity in queer folks, in those who come to our countries because they are displaced by our governments policies of war.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

The Great Dictator Speech – Charlie Chaplin [2]

It's not enough to vote only in National Elections. You build solidarity, go to each election, even if it's for a parish council. Gain the experience of organising, learn the joy that comes from being a part of community. Help to build community.

Build those bonds of friendship and respect. Choose to support parties that aren't the status quo of Conservative/Slightly less Conservative. Vote. Join the parties that you vote for and spend time getting to know the people in those parties. If you're in those parties and some folks can't attend meetings because of disability make those meetings accessible. Make remote access to those meetings available. We can't have a true democracy unless everyone can participate.

Freedom is a natural thing. It is also a responsibility. Power is also a responsibility. But what we should take from this is that we should share our Freedoms, share our power. It shares the responsibility and lightens the burden on us.

For our democracies to function, we must actively engage in them. We must make our democracies accessible to everyone. We must extend the social safety net to everyone.

Not distribute power and our largess to people we think are most deserving. Humanity tends to fail at that. We tend to believe in the glamour of the rich and them being good people. As if amassing enough money to be a billionaire is a virtue rather than being a robber baron.

When you go around the world, people surprise you with hospitality. We've been given free cups of coffee in Spain on a wet day on our motorbikes. We've paid that hospitality forward in cafe's for other bikers or giving a hitchhiker a ride. We're been to borders at the edge of Europe. I've been given a large apple bigger than my hand by a kindly old man for free while on a rope ferry in Hungary. People can be generous with each other, but in order to do so, we have to recognise each other's humanity. We have to recognise each other's human rights to exist and be in our places. We need to ensure everyone can live in freedom and safety.

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

The Great Dictator Speech – Charlie Chaplin [2]

People are kind. In that kindness is resistance to Authoritarianism.

Be kind, be responsible, share what you can and don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it. Building a community safety net, starts locally. But gradually it expands. While some people want a solution at scale. Most folks care about local issues. We aren't built to understand the contexts of millions or even billions. But brick by brick we can build our communities, we can share the responsibility of power and understand the contexts of issues that make a local communities life harder.

It's why local communities supporting each other is how we counter the far right. We make our local communities our beacons in the dark.

That as well as protests is how we fight authoritarianism. By not succumbing to it's seduction in the first place. We find our resistance in each other. In our communities that we build by finding solidarity with each other.

[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Trail_of_Political_Consciousness

[2] https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/synopsis/articles/29-The-Great-Dictator-s-Speech

The world was locked in calamity

As the plague roamed the world

It changed us body and soul

While the world locked itself away.

We stayed in for safety

But then the world forgot.

Changed body and soul by the virus

But the locked in ones stayed in under glass

Some of us had been infected

Broken at first.

We ended up in the glass coffin

Together you and I

Watched the world carry on with the lies

People saw us as delusional

As we kept the coffin closed

But we had each other.

Locked in under glass.

In the distance we saw the reflections

Other Lights imprisoned under glass

We couldn't free each other

We used light to reach out.

There's a crack in the coffin.

But back to hibernation we go.

There's no prince to rescue the maiden.

He's locked in glass too.

Awaiting kindness rather than a kiss.

But it's still not safe

We venture out carefully in Armour

As the worlds a hostile place

Back to the Glass Coffin

Whenever there's fall out in a community or a community space is less diverse, we end up with a postmortem on our community areas. Sometimes we have a discussion on what the community is like overall. Then nothing is done, because no one comes forward. No one really wants to change things. The folks you designated as troublemakers just don't want to help. They engaged and your community utterly failed to welcome them. Instead those folks were ignored, or worse attacked.

Sometimes someone vital to the project quits. People step up, but some of the original folks who added so much to your community are gone. They aren't coming back.

It's very rare for anyone to let the public part of the community know why.

There's a reason for that. The repercussions for whistle blowers can be life threatening or merely career ending, particularly if they are from a diverse background. Although in our capitalist world, career ending can affect quality of life. So still life threatening.

Being a public facing woman in tech is like walking over a tightrope while someone starts thrumming the rope. Plus the tightrope is strung over over lava. You get to hear the fading sounds of folks who fell off ahead and behind you. You wonder what will knock you off.

So when you're in an abusive space, who do you trust?

How do you work out who to trust? To tell you if this is normal or not? How can you know if you're in a safe space?

For many of us, there is no such thing as a safe space. Especially in FOSS.

So women tend to do what we've always done. We talk, and it's not gossip about drama.

Men often want to reduce our whispers to mere gossip. The image of the gossiping old biddy to be feared and yet mocked. We grow up with internalised misogyny beaten into us by society. We're called scolds. [1]

Don't be like those mean old ladies. Be a cool girl.

We gather intelligence and share stories about our experience. We share carefully coded messages about who to be careful about.

It's so much more than just gossip.

The Whisper Network

We have some very public examples in our community when toxic community leaders are called out with receipts. Harassment happens. Our sanity is questioned, our career options are limited as we get to be labelled troublemakers.

So we hunker down until we are in a smaller quieter space. We're careful about what we say. In the silence between those words we detect what isn't said. We respond and the folks in our smaller spaces realise what we haven't said in turn.

Our whispers become stories and those stories become passwords.

About a week in, I showed a few of my new friends some emails I’d been getting from an older male writer many of us knew. The messages weren’t explicit or threatening, but something about their tone had made me distinctly uncomfortable. It was hard to put my finger on. I passed my phone around, trying to explain why I’d felt so creeped out, repeating every few minutes that I knew there was nothing tangible, that I was probably just making it up. “Am I crazy?” I asked, over and over again. Everyone kept shaking their heads.

A story like this is a password. Once you say it out loud, doors start to open.

Stories Like Passwords – Emma Healey [2]

​Misogyny

As a white woman, I can't really comment on the undercurrent for other folks and their experiences. But scratch a racist that pushes against any consideration for black folks and you'll find all the other things they are against as well. The same for a Fascist. The same for a TERF.

While we are all human, people who actively deny the human rights for other people harm others. Ultimately they will harm your human rights to be on top. So pushing for safe spaces for Trans folks, for disabled folks, for black and brown folks is important.

But it takes more than empty words of policy to enable me to trust you. Which is the same for everyone. If you are prepared to engage with TERFS and racists “because they do good work”, I know that ultimately you aren't safe to engage with. [3], [4]

But this has always been the culture within FOSS. The women are missing, but that's also across Tech. We have systematic issues within our Tech communities and society at large. Powerful influential men who through the tech they build, the communities they create can ruin Women's careers. Their networks of influence reinforce their power.

The men in stories like this always have just enough power, in their little worlds and in ours, that to confront them would be to court an ordeal, to invite others to question our own memories and motives. It’s always more trouble than it’s worth. If you don’t have hard proof, if you don’t have a police report, then what do you have? Only what you remember. Only what you felt.

Stories Like Passwords – Emma Healey [2]

Our disquiet with a situation, with our interactions are dismissed as drama. Our lack of safety is ignored. So of course it isn't worth it.

So we carefully work in the shadows. Giving support to each other and counteract the gas lighting in our communities.

It's not drama. No you aren't imagining this.

Are you safe?

[1] https://dotart.blog/cobbles/the-scolds-bridle [2] https://medium.com/the-hairpin/stories-like-passwords-bf04e46c3fb6 [3] https://dotart.blog/cobbles/on-bears [4] https://medium.com/@violetblue/but-he-does-good-work-6710df9d9029

Introduction

Before I start. I want to be extremely clear. I love the Fediverse. I love being on the Fediverse. I'm extremely grateful to developers like Eugen. I have a Peertube account on spectra.video kindly provided for free by Sean Tilley. Librecast posts it's videos on that channel and has a mastodon account on chaos.social. As do I on onepict@chaos.social.

The Fediverse is a wonderful alternative to the walled gardens of the 2010s. It offers interoperability.

I've participated on social hub. My project is a funded by NGI Zero which funds many projects for Activity Pub integration. So I do want to be in solidarity with these projects. I don't want to piss on them or burn bridges within my community. There's a huge “however” coming.

I'm writing this rather long post. It's going to upset people. Despite my posts I don't like upsetting people. But I will call out the vibes if I feel we've not really learned anything. For all we protocol wash this stuff, nothing's changed.

I'm seeing history repeat itself. I'm seeing attitudes repeating themselves.

Especially with the recent quote about FOSS being dead. Which is true. I agree with that. Our communities and their spirits are being picked over by AI that steals our creations and creates zombies without our living fire in it.

Telling yourself that you're a FOSS project and doing good merely because you picked a licence isn't enough. Open Source has always been the acceptable face to the corporate world because it couldn't really cope with the idea of Free Software.

In our community, we tell ourselves Fairy Tales.

That's not fair. As adults, we tell ourselves fairy tales all the time. We tell ourselves comforting lies about the way the world works.

In FOSS we tell ourselves the comforting lie that what we do is ethical. Merely by writing code and releasing it under an Open Source Licence. – Esther Payne (me) [20]

However we also have a huge divide even within the Free Software world. Individual liberty over communal freedoms. Which is how we end up with the divide within the Fediverse community. Some folks really do have a problem with Opt in Consent and want to connect the world, publishing everything and sharing everything automatically.

Back in the olden times

Nearly two decades ago I was at a mini meetup where various Open Source using companies in Scotland met up to try to figure out a workable replacement for Microsoft Exchange. There was the talk about how we were nearly there and “yeah, we'd save the world from these evil proprietary Corporate Software Companies”. We'd save the world from Microsoft!

There was one dissenting voice. From a guy who believed in what we aimed to do. But was also working with Exchange day to day. Who saw just how integrated Exchange was in the Corporate world. But the underlying unspoken aim that none of us spoke out loud, was that we wanted to take over to win.

As we ended up in the startup community in Edinburgh, much of the same sentiment was closer to the surface. We had bloop, a twitter clone where the initial organiser of Tech Meetup Edinburgh was desperately trying to get us to sign up. Even creating a cross-poster to link up Facebook and Twitter. As a Managing Director friend of mine pointed out: “What's the point of it. We have Twitter and Facebook.”

We also tended to use those networks for separate things in my spaces. Twitter for the Activism, Facebook for family and friends. We knew better than to mix the groups. We were trying to prevent context collapse before other folks defined it for us. So we'd attend for the free pizza and mix together. Then some of us would go for a pint nearby and Kebab Mahal for the awesome curry and think about what folks pitched. To our little group of folks in small business who were used to Infrastructure, it seemed like a bunch of marketing wank. Solutions looking for a problem.

So looking in from an ocean and landmass away, It was interesting seeing the spirit of the startup culture showing up. It's great that developers are meeting up together. I wish there'd been some Health Policy and masking. But I know that's asking too much from many folks in FOSS.[25], [26]

We tell ourselves the fairy tale that we care, yet our values are lacking in that regard. [23], [24]

Fedicon and the two sides of Fedi

Other posts and articles have covered the two sides of the Fediverse ad-nauseam. We know the two sides, the vulnerable folks who'd like opt-in consent to be built into the design of our Fediverse applications from the beginning. Those who want to connect up everything and share information between protocols and federate everything. Even when the political considerations or consequences have never been thought about.

Ben Pate's presentation was quoted over the Fediverse by the attendees. What was quoted by some of the well known members of our Fediverse seemed to starkly illustrate the divide in attitude. Sometimes our community seems to get it. The idea of consent, and presenting ourselves as different from places like Twitter and Facebook. I mean we have IFTAS and some block lists. That's enough isn't it? We care!

No politics here! Only Connections! Yay!

“The connections between the nodes are more important than the nodes themselves.”

—Ben Pate at Fedicon August 02 2025 [1]

A quote like this is lovely. Yes, this is the freedom of Association part. It's Article 20 of the UNCHR. Freedom of Association in Safety. Then I remember bridges to Bluesky and Nostr [6]The “Apolitical” Networking Protocol. An instance using that software bridged and posted Dentangles posts about Alonso[a] on its network which is indexed by Google. Dentangle selected the No Index tag. So we had an issue with NodeBB and also discovered a Nostr instance synced those posts to it's instance. Which also doesn't seem to respect the NoIndex tag.

Nostr has a reputation for this. Nostr also works with Alex Gleason who does good work so why not? Yes, that Alex Gleason who used to work for Truth Social. Activity Pub has some issues and was never designed for many folks needs. So consent isn't really built in. It's the nature of the Internet. It was never really designed for Privacy and Security and our developer community is a reflection of that. After all, many developers started in FOSS. We're conditioned to work together and not discuss politics.

It's why when reporting on the block evasion of authorised fetch the article on we distribute was neutral about it. After all we're all working together for a common good to connect everyone up in a decentralised network. Why on earth might some folks not want to associate with us? [7].[8]

“AGREE TO DISAGREE” IS RESERVED FOR THINGS LIKE “I DON'T LIKE MARMITE.” NOT HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA. NOT HUMAN RIGHTS. NOT BASIC COMMON DECENCY. WE DO NOT HAVE A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION HERE. WE HAVE A DIFFERENCE IN MORALITY. DISAGREEING WITH THE VALIDITY OF SOMEONE'S IDENTITY AND THE RIGHTS AND SERVICES THEY DESERVE OR DON'T DESERVE BECAUSE OF IT IS DISCRIMINATION, NOT DISAGREEMENT. – David A. Evans

But why do we associate with everyone?

It depends on your goals. The other half of the Fediverse is a product of our startup culture on both sides of the pond. The line goes up. We must connect everybody!

Granted these are quotes from a presentation where everyone is bigging each other up. It's an important part of the community to support each other and show solidarity for each other. To grow the community.

It's also why at times, we distribute does show more solidarity for the Dev Community in the Wider decentralised community than us folks who complain about the lack of consent in the culture. I'm sure the Activity Pub and Bridging Folks feel very singled out. But here's the thing.

We expect better of you.

Yet even with a pisstake in a presentation it comes off as well as the “Developers, Developers, Developers” quote by Steve Balmer[9] It's great enthusiasm but it sets off alarm bells about corporate Fedi. You talk a good community group game. But it's no movement. You can't manufacture a movement when a good portion of your community don't feel safe in it. You can't grow a movement when you seem to have a lack of empathy for it.

You seem to think of us as haters. But if we were haters, we would just leave. Some folks have had to because of your lack of care. Much like when we've lost folks to the Proprietary world. We failed them utterly.

In the grand scheme of things, the Fediverse is still very, very small. We’re at the early peak of the “Innovators” section of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle.

Threads and Bluesky absolutely crush us in terms of user numbers, and they themselves are only tiny slices compared to even bigger platforms.

#FediCon [2]

Hot takes those posts may be. But it really gives off an air of huffing each others farts.

Like I get it. I've been there and you're all having a great time, being inspired in person. Eating together, sharing tips, doing hackathons. It helps to keep you going. Its why I loved going to conferences.

Being in a space with other Devs with no one nagging you for changes and not being mean to you is great. I'm sure there's always encouraging conversations to reassure developers that they didn't do anything wrong, or it was a mistake and you don't deserve the pile on. To be fair, no one does. Including the various minorities on the fediverse, who when they do point out what's wrong with our culture on here get way worse. No one deserves Death threats, doxing and stalking. You're getting a tiny bit of the experience for a lot of vulnerable folks on here.

I'm sympathetic really. Don't mistake that for me being a nice person. I know that some folks will be a bit upset and see this as another scold. [8]

It is a scold, but there are also behaviours to be encouraged and some of the devs in our spaces are changing. Are listening when things happen and do try to mitigate the damage. The damage is still done. So it still needs to be called out, because there's a pipeline to the Fediverse that thinks about the technical aspect first and the wider community a long time afterwards. [10]

Which Developers like Darius are working on, to create a testing framework with generated data, so we don't have incidents like the nodeBB one over the weekend.

I try my best to be kind. But I won't hide behind niceness. Niceness is a falsity. Being nice to each other and framing it as kindness means you can ignore the Fascist in the dev teams. After all if you never talk about your politics in the open, you can claim you never knew they were harmful.

Context Collapse

“There are 8 billion humans, and we should aim to serve every single one….We can’t exactly hold up the Fediverse as a viable alternative when we leave so many people behind.”

— Ben Pate at Fedicon August 02 2025

This was the quote that made some of us on the other side of the fedi divide nervous. The side that prefers context in our communications.

I have to admit I get nervous when I see Devs on here being obsessed with scale and reaching billions of people.

Yes we do need to share information.

But we can't scale context or the complexities of language. We can't really understand the scale of billions.

Sharing information and translating is an art and takes some empathy.

Scale does matter for the transport, but the message?

You need to consider context, that takes people. It should also take explicit, enthusiastic consent.

“The 100 people in this room are the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1%... If knowledge of the Fediverse were money, we would all be hundred-billionnaires.” [2] Ben Pate at Fedicon August 02 2025

This is hype cycle. This is the us and them. This gives off a mixture of mid-life crisis devs having missed out on the 2010 gold rush. Along with the kids who are so excited to be with these guys. They are finally here! Whohoo! We're so much nicer than Facebook or Twitter. Despite the fact that you'll still work with threads and Blusky which Jack Dorsey funded. Nothing's changed, we're just a little more open. We still are reducing people to the numbers.

We are still objectifying folks and logging the numbers to show our success. The line goes up.

It's the attitude that doesn't mind a bridge between separate networks of folks who perhaps shouldn't be mixed. It's the attitude that encourages context collapse.

It's also the same attitude of the earlier crop of walled garden social networks that encouraged us all to upload our address books so that our contacts had shadow profiles on those networks without their consent.

Facebook has always had a rather shonky idea of consent. It seems to be the standard Silicon Valley growth mindset to suggest users find their friends. By asking you to upload your address book. If you did upload your contacts, it's made you culpable as well in that very bad idea of consent.

Yes you.

If you uploaded your address book, there will be a shadow profile of someone who never wanted to be on Facebook. Their information is on Facebook's servers without their consent.

Chances are that person may well have told you this as well.

It's well past the time since 2013 for you to be listening to them.

Which is why I'm against the bridges. When our followers bridge our content, the current state of affairs with Activity Pub means we have very little control over where our posts get shared.

How to deal with an issue

Julian who developed NodeBB, once he was made aware of the issue with Dentangles profile and posts fixed the profile not respecting the no Index part.

There's still some stuff I don't agree with like treating public and unlisted posts as the same. Which is more of a Mastodon thing and we really could do with consent being considered for version 2 of Activity Pub. Although with the Organisations that are part of the SWF I have a feeling privacy and consent will be at the bottom of the pile for Activity Pub improvements.

Eugen also recognised the issue and pinpointed the cause. [12]

Both developers were calm and polite and listened. Which is more than I can say for the circle the wagons types who see any complaint as an attack. Who also prefer to focus on the classification of the behaviour rather than consider the consequences. Anyone who brings up these sort of issues in the public as a call out will attract the ire of community defenders as much as devs who want to sort out the problem. When controversy happens on the fediverse, there is an overwhelm with discussions that mention the person as the originator. Which can cause that account to consider shutting down and leaving. Because of course we want to defend our projects. Of course the community that has built up around projects wants to defend them.

It's a thing that makes me nervous as Librecast gets bigger, as we build more. I love the fact our community is supportive. We're still building something to be usable. We're at the foundations. I love the faith that the community is putting in us.

If we screw up down the line, we need to be accountable for that. I'd never want to be responsible for a pile on because of a fuck up on our part. So I hope our wider community always takes the time to understand the situation, and waits for our response before reacting. Every member of our community is an ambassador for it.

At times, some parts of the Fediverse in their need to defend it, are not great ambassadors for a community. To be fair neither are a lot of FOSSfolks. We've got decades of form, with little solidarity for vulnerable communities.

But the thing to remember is regardless of how a post on the fediverse ended up being indexed by google. The fact is that user expectations were broken, a users posts was indexed on Google.

We're careless with peoples data. We always have been and I'd like us to do better.

How to consider opt out

Money and power are not the problem. The centralization of that money and power are the problem. – Ben Pate at Fedicon August 02 2025 [4]

This is a great acknowledgement of one of the reasons we are in the online situation we are in. But it's not the whole story. Decentralisation much like multicast is not the panacea for fixing the problems. They are merely the transports for information.

Who we choose to associate with, what are their politics does matter. You can't expect vulnerable folks to associate with others who have a laissez fair attitude to Privacy and politics. Money is merely a way to enforce and gain power.

The problem is who we associate with to enable that power and influence. The problem is not recognising the solidarity we should have with folks who require mutual aid. The folks who do require some privacy but who want to have some visibility because we live in a capitalist world and artists do need to eat sometime this month. As do developers and community folks. [13 – 19 ]

There is another way. If you want to develop in the Fediverse. Consider consent! [21]

Sometimes consent has already been built in via the way the network you need to bridge was built in the first place as Encyclia Found. But Encyclia has also made opt-out very easy. There's a paper you can read and everything. [22] The developers analysed Orcid and the fediverse communities, they asked folks like Jon Pincus (and myself) what we thought. Before Julian Fietkau even asked, there was an automatic opt-out mechanism. I have an Orcid id, and I work in the public. So it's a useful bridge for me. Julian took the time to understand both communities and put the work in to get community buy in.

More of that please.

[a] A small Dog who visits dentangle. Alonso is awesome.

[1] https://social.wedistribute.org/objects/374c4a38-afe7-47ad-bfda-53e56d270b2d

[2] https://cosocial.ca/@evan/114960662017514079

[3] https://social.wedistribute.org/objects/332b437c-18ea-4cc0-bf1c-9beeba406617 archive.today link

[4] https://j12t.social/@j12t/114960633276222308 archive.today link

[5] https://www.onepict.com/consentpartdeux20240215.html

[6] https://wedistribute.org/2024/05/nostr-crash-course/

[7] https://wedistribute.org/2023/12/authorized-fetch-circumvented/

[8] https://dotart.blog/cobbles/the-scolds-bridle

[9] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-ballmer-viral-sweaty-developers-chant-microsoft-2025-6

[10] https://cathode.church/fedi-scraper-counter.html

[11] https://community.nodebb.org/post/105338

[12] https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/114959141909677032

[13] https://www.onepict.com/20240813-ecosystem.html

[14] https://www.onepict.com/20241114-hats.html

[15] https://www.onepict.com/20240409-sustain.html

[16] https://www.onepict.com/20240409-sustain.html

[17] https://www.onepict.com/20240512-elephant.html

[18] https://www.onepict.com/2022-11-28-resign.html

[19] https://www.onepict.com/20240601-fedieco.html

[20] https://www.onepict.com/20250119-cobbles.html

[21] https://privacy.thenexus.today/consent-for-fediverse-developers/

[22] https://encyclia.pub/optin-optout-analysis

[23] https://librecast.net/fluconf-2025/

[24] https://librecast.net/2025-07-31-matrix-and-linkedin.html

[25] https://beige.party/@PhoenixSerenity/114950635483009795

[26] https://dotart.blog/cobbles/why-the-cobbles

TW: Rape Clause

I am a child of defiance.

I'm not talking about a childish feeling of breaking the rules.

I'm talking about my very existence being defiance.

Family

Starting with my mother being disabled and recovering from a coma after a horrific car accident where the doctors didn't think she'd wake up. Or have children. My father's determination to make sure he was in my life when my parents split up was defiance. I defied my mothers wishes to forget my father in turn and at thirteen I left my mother to live with my father.

When my grandmother died, my brother and I lowered her into her grave. Which I had to fight for the right for both of us to lower her down. Convention wanted men who weren't related to her to do it. I was fortunate the rest of the family backed me up, but there was pressure to get me to back down.

This defiance wasn't just a circumstantial occurrence. It's been baked into me from generations of ancestors before me. We aren't always loud about it, but we also can't just accept circumstances.

My Grandfather joining a union and becoming a strike leader was defiance against his conservative voting parents. My other grandfather rolling into a field after being captured in 1940 and then helping others to escape France was defiance.

Sometimes though, defiance is existing despite your circumstances.

I always knew that my maternal great-grandmothers father was a secret. She didn't know who he was and her mother slammed the door on the man who turned up at her door a few years after her daughters birth.

I'd recently done a little family history and searched for that side of the family. I found an extra sibling that I'm not sure my Grandmother knew about. I know that her grandmother was herself brought up by her unmarried mother.

In the UK we currently have the two child rule limit on child tax credits (also known as the Rape Clause because if you've been raped and had a child then it's not limited.) A very awful right wing law that tries to define who is the “deserving poor”. It judges poor women with multiple children. Our society loves to blame women for it's lack of care of poor families. We've not moved beyond Victorian Industrial morality. [1][2]

I looked at the census for 1891 and saw a grandmother, a mother and her daughter living with their uncle. I found three children with different surnames.

I looked further and saw how estranged those two women were from family with only a brother living with them. The black sheep of the family. In a small town in the North East of Scotland in Victorian times. Those women were tough, both women survived into their seventies.

They survived scrabbling from job to job. It took brothers to go out into the world and earn money to give stability and a home over their heads. They worked where they could in factories, doing knitting and as washer women. All to put food on the table.

They survived despite being considered loose women. They survived despite there being no social contract. They survived despite not being the “deserving poor.” I sat there looking at the screen for a while. Feeling that coal of rage within me heat up. But at the same time I marveled at the toughness of those women.

Defiance doesn't always have to be loud. Sometimes defiance is existing and bringing up the next generation. We build on each generations progress. It's slow and sometimes we are knocked back down.

Betrayal of the Social Contract

I think about the fact that I got an education and got an Honours degree in Computer Science.

From 1860 which is roughly when my great-great-great grandmother was pregnant (and gasp, was unmarried), it only took nearly one hundred and fifty years for someone in the family to get there. To rise from the very dregs of polite society to having qualifications to participate as part of my community as an equal.

Girls in my family mainly tend to go into teaching. I got a different class of degree.

My grandmothers sister got a good education and became a teacher, she was sponsored by her uncle. She had a patron. My Grandmother had to stay home to look after the family, because she was the youngest. She was intelligent, but ignorant. So she made sure I did my homework. A part of her resented not being able to get an education.

So both of my living Grandparents were proud I made it to University.

My cousins and myself are the first generation in my family on my Fathers side to go on to further education, straight from school. I'm the first girl for both sides of my family, to get a degree that's more on the Sciences and engineering side.

I was only able to do this because my generation was the last generation to get grants. I got a free education because I was too poor for tuition fees. I feel very angry about the opportunities that other folks are denied.

When you have policies that want to judge people and only help people who are the “deserving poor” then you've gone backwards. This is why I am a huge believer in Universal Basic Income. I also want a Free Education to all, Free Healthcare and Free Public Transport. We could have this.

The reason we don't is because very rich people want to control who gets looked after. They don't want their taxes to pay for the poor to build a better life and community.

This is the betrayal of Labour on the populace in the UK. Not just within Government but our political representatives making legislature. It was activists who pushed over decades for social policy. For a National Health Service, for Free Education, for Nationalised Infrastructure.

Thatcher did a lot of damage. But New Labour continued it. From opposition they allowed the two child limit to be voted in. From opposition they were whipped to vote for Brexit. Labour has not been a socialist party for a long time. They cater to centrism, so of course they are gradually turning more right wing.

Labour have betrayed the social movements that caused it to be created. Now they are criminalising protest. They are making it harder to protest the wrongs in our society and things like genocide.

So the most radical thing that any of us can do is pass our knowledge onto others. To ensure that knowledge is available to others. It's a defiance of those who would limit our thoughts and our knowledge to do so. Sometimes we may be considered hostile in our tone. People for the status quo tend to see any push back as hostile. So that should never stop us.

We need more defiance. I don't want it to be another One Hundred and Fifty years before families get that further education. I want education to be free to everyone and available to everyone.

Defiance doesn't always have to be loud.

[1] https://www.womensaidni.org/everything-wanted-know-rape-clause/ [2] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/child-tax-credit-exceptions-to-the-2-child-limit

Introduction

Late last week it was revealed that a moderator on Fosstodon had some rather abhorrent views that were posted on Reddit and that moderator made some extremely questionable moderation choices on that platform.

Fosstodon's initial response was “Well the mod's not doing it on here, so it's fine.”

Many folks on the Fediverse, including myself felt differently. There was a point where Fosstodon could have put a message going “We are aware of the allegations against the mod. Bear with us while we investigate.”

They did not do that.

The mod came back on and started defending themselves. Other Fosstodon users defended their community with vibes of “so much for the tolerant left.”

I get the defensiveness. I do. No one likes to be told that folks don't like their community. Folks do take exception to the idea that they are sitting in the Nazi bar. We tend to think of Fascism as being violent and taking over a space violently. We don't think of them in our spaces quietly having a cup of tea. But that's how it works, there's no one way for it to take over our space. If it was purely violent, folks would push back.

So normal folks, comfortable in the status quo, don't know about the dog whistles. They repeat words said by Fascists using those dog-whistles and it becomes mainstream. The left are seen as the unstable ones for pointing out the elephant in the room that's about to go on the rampage. So it becomes easier to leave the bar. Leave the community because it isn't safe. It's not just Fosstodon, it's everywhere. So in the end it's Nazis and you. You're not a Fascist, you aren't a Nazi why are those folks saying your space is the Nazi bar?

It's not exactly a secret that over the years Fosstodon has been the home of the reply guy. It's also the home of some awesome FOSS folks and projects. Fosstodon is FOSS Centrism personified. It's a safe space for FOSS centrists and that's fine. But don't expect queer fediverse to give you the benefit of the doubt when you have a Fascist modding your instance.

Mike and Kev quit. Reading Kev's post it was everything I expected it to be. Kev's never been diplomatic. Kev's also uncomfortable with pronouns and likes poking progressives in his posts occasionally. Mike was more diplomatic and laid out how they got there. Starting from just two friends doing an instance, then others joined.

Yet another example of how some of us shouldn't be in charge of spaces, especially when they grow to a large size. To be clear I'm not saying I would be. There's a reason I'm on an instance with excellent instance owners. It's a mostly drama-free instance, and some of that comes from the boundaries that are set in the instance rules.

I moved there from Fosstodon. I'd wanted to move for a while, not because of anything bad. It just didn't quite fit me.

My First Mastodon instance

Fosstodon was my first instance and for me, as a privileged individual in FOSS, it was a good instance. Mike in particular was very good at handling disputes in the early days of it as a small community. But as open sign-up instances do it grew.

Reading the Instance admins posts it sounds like the responsibility of this small community was no longer fun. Which I understand. As the numbers get bigger and you feel attacked by people it can cause a bit of a hunkering down mentality.

We all changed and grew. In time I was given an invitation to an instance that is a better fit for me. Which is how it should work here. When I moved we only just had the tools to move followers etc. Mastodon is changing and the more upfront about the things that we need the better.

Users need better tools for moving posts, although that brings up a can of worms for other instances depending on the size of the account. Instance owners need more guidance and help setting up their communities. Moderators need more tools to help them moderate a community.

But any community needs a set of rules and some guidance so that when they do have folks helping them out in positions of power they choose people very carefully and do some due diligence. Fosstodon also has always made an explicit political statement “No Politics”. Which is reflective of its community. There are a lot of folks in FOSS who believe that Tech can exist without political bias.

Tech is political. Of course it is. Making a sandwich is political. – Zen and the Art of Multicast, Brett Sheffield

Fosstodon has faced a lot of drama. Some of that drama can be placed at the point of creation of that community. It's about values. More of us need to consider that when we create our community spaces.

As Brett Sheffield wrote in Zen and the Art of Multicast

A good Code of Conduct sets out the kinds of behaviour expected by all members of the community. Those that aren’t in alignment with your Values are less likely to get involved, and it is much easier to tap the sign later if you actually have one.

In other words, we need to be more open about our values. On the fediverse, this is incredibly important to do. We can reduce drama on the network if we state our boundaries and accept the idea that not every node on our network needs to talk to every other node on the network.

On here we don't have to repeat the model of the early 2010s of scale to connect everyone on the planet. Some of us want our cozy groups and we wish to state our boundaries.

Many of us know that you cannot escape politics. Making Free Software is an explicitly political act.

When you write (or choose not to write) a piece of software, this is a political act. The choice of whether and what to write, how you make it, where you publish it, if you publish it, under which license you release it, who you collaborate with, the types of users you target etc. are all political considerations. Perhaps you don’t consider it political, as the developer. You were just scratching a personal itch, but the consequences of your choices can have wide-ranging impacts, whether you choose to consider them or not.

Choosing not to play the game is also a move. You cannot escape politics.

• Zen and the Art of Multicast, Brett Sheffield

Power, Instance Owners and Mods

Frankly, though the Nazi bar analogy is correct. Just because a mod isn't openly doing their bigotry on the Fediverse doesn't mean you should trust them in a position of power. But in tech, we've been conditioned to consider working with all sorts of people. Now in our political systems, we can see the results of that. You only have to look at DOGE and how it's destroying a lot of the limited good the US was funding in the world.

Fosstodon's pains at the moment are a reflection of what we're facing in tech. We do need to take responsibility for our choices. We need to take a look at the people who are abusing others. We need to stop letting people in our community abuse others or hold frankly inhumane views because they do good work. This issue isn't a fediverse only issue. It's in all of our Tech communities. FOSS isn't immune because of the magic of the licence we choose. It takes more than that.

To think that a mod who is a bigot and for forced deportation of Immigrants is at all appropriate on an instance where there are a lot of FOSS projects was carelessness. Fascists are very good at appearing reasonable in public. That's how you edge the status quo and the centre to the far right.

I understand that for some folks it's easier not to confront the elephant in the room. But it takes up a lot of space and forces others out of the room. At a time when we need new ideas, new life experiences new voices.

Shared Power, Shared Responsibility

Years ago I wrote an essay that was about Threads and the Fedipact. But what it really was about Power and how we give power to instance owners and we should choose carefully.

As a community, we need to give more tools to help instance owners and mods. Because being an instance owner or a mod is a thankless job. A community has a balance and if you can you should contribute something to your online home. Perhaps money, perhaps time for admin.

At least the small community work of gently calling out poor behaviour when you see it, this is something everyone in a community can do. But you have to want to do it. You have to want to grow to change. It is uncomfortable.

Instance owners are not the same as Community Managers

Fosstodon's story is the same as many community stories on the fediverse and in tech. A group of people get together and start a small instance. Like-minded people join and before you know it you have thousands of people who join your “vanity handled themed instance.”

This was a lost opportunity. Let's compare the pariah of some parts of the fediverse. Mastodon Art. The instance was handed over and the instance owner has learned. Mastodon art has a fairly straightforward set of ground rules and it balances the need for an audience for .art members with a safe space.

Everyone needs a safe space. Even FOSSBros. That's fine. You are allowed a safe space. But declare those boundaries upfront. Accept the fact that not everyone wants to federate with you.

If it does grow beyond you, start considering that at a certain size, you need someone who understands community. It's a skill. We have folks in our networks who do this for a living.

Small is better

But many instances are run on a shoestring, as a labour of love. Like Fosstodon was. We are many nodes on a network. Federation is complicated. But there's nothing wrong with staying small, going invite only. Vet who you let moderate your community

Vet the instances you want to join. Yes, we need more education and an idea of who federates with who. But there are valid reasons for some instances to not publish those relationships too.

Curate your space.

The Future of FOSSTODON

It's in the hands of the Fosstodon community now. Which is perhaps the best thing. Communities do outgrow their founders and a responsible founder should have a succession plan. Especially when it's essentially a flagship instance for FOSS.

Gina a former mod is stepping up and working with Kev and Mike to see if the instance can be saved. There is enough technical experience in that community. The challenge will be for the community to take a look at itself and decide what it wants to be in relation to the wider fediverse.

Perhaps it will only want to federate with the bigger instances. Perhaps it will change its rules. Now's the time to do the best for Fosstodon's community. What's comfortable for the Fosstodon community may be incompatible with some parts of the fediverse.

Which is fine. It's best to declare this now. It's literally the point of the fediverse. It's the choice of everyone involved. From you in your choice of instance, to the instance owners choosing who to federate with.

Further Reading

https://www.librecast.net/fluconf-2025/ https://www.onepict.com/consent-fediverse20230627.html https://mikestone.me/2025-04-28-do-what-you-love https://fosstodon.org/@Gina/114419575474730515 https://kevquirk.com/blog/my-thoughts-on-the-fosstodon-drama https://thelibre.news/fosstodons-drama-reveals-a-much-deeper-mastodon-problem/

When I see the vitriol directed at women and other marginalised folks online I'm often reminded of the scold's bridle. This particular reminder was WeDistribute's article on Fedionfire and how the Fediverse backlash caused it to shutter. [2]

It was an article that was particularly disappointing from WeDistribute after they published the Nexus of Privacy's 8 Tips for Developers article. I felt WeDistribute was rather punching down on the community there. [13]

We saw similar opinion pieces around the Fediverse on BridgyFed and on Threads when folks decided to band together for the Fedipact.

There's a push and pull between those who want smaller communities and those who want to “Facilitate Network Discovery”. You've a lot of marginalised folks on the Fediverse, LGBTQ+ folks, Women, BIPOC, disabled folks. There's complexity in our communities and reasons why some folks want to organise in the open, but don't necessarily want to be searched for.

But as usual, backlash happens, and hurt white feelings abound. Somehow the community who never asked to be collated get called out as the hysterical folks who just need to shut up.

It's the need to shame the shamers because you felt scolded. We harshed your buzz and goodness, don't you just want to make us pay for it so we never do it again.

What is the Scolds Bridle?

It was a form of punishment mainly of outspoken women or gossips or Scolds. It was an iron cage with a spiked bit that would pierce your tongue if you tried to speak. The scold would wear the bridle for an amount of time, often being led around the area. It was a painful, humiliating punishment. [3]

Scolds weren't the only folks punished, it was used against Quakers preaching as well. So let's be clear on this. The Branks as they were also known were used to subjugate women. To shame them and be an example to others to not speak up. A violent state punishment to protect the status quo.

We never asked for you to collate our posts

Some of us found out that Fedionfire took posts from the public firehose. [1] We weren't very happy about it, some folk snarked. There were threats as well.

Folks don't send threats to the developer. Pointing and laughing are fine though. For one thing, I've found some devs tend to have very thin skins when it comes to mockery.

In all seriousness though, We shouldn't have to keep pushing back. I've literally written a couple of essays about Consent and the Fediverse. [5], [6]

We care about consent on here. It is possible to ask folks if the thing you are doing might upset people because you are collating their posts without their permission. Heck, there's a list of previous developers who haven't cared and had serious pushback on it. Don't just listen to other CIS white developers who don't see anything wrong with it. Especially if they feel Facebook being in our space is so cool. As I wrote in Consent and the Fediverse, there's a reason some of us left.

But let's address just why there's a backlash against the backlash. White Supremacy is fearful of rage when it doesn't come from a cis white man.

Feminine Rage

Why did such a thing as the branks exist? Why do men feel the need to reply guy back to women explaining the world and the experience they live in? Why do we have Christofacism hand in hand with Trump in the Whitehouse? Why is there such a need to undo progress?

Why do some folks in the Fediverse feel this need to punch down on Folks like WelshPixie and the admins on the Fedipact?

The thing that I note is that it is very often white cis male developers who do these things. When people push back, there are a lot of hurt feelings. There are accusations of harassment.

Men are scared of feminine rage. They fear the scolding. Not just because their feelings of doing something bad may make them feel bad. There's some misogyny to work on there. There's some racism to work on. There's homophobia to work on. This is our socialisation to uphold White Supremacy.

As a cis woman, I've been socialised to keep my rage in. To be nice. To provide feedback nicely. To ask nicely and to advise nicely. I hold in my rage. It's a rather tenuous thread at this point. I'm not sure what would happen if it snapped.

I find it very hard nowadays to keep that rage in, every time I see another scraper, or pulling from the firehose tool. Sometimes it's physically painful to keep the scream of anger and tears in. But I do. My iron branks are mental, my socialisation. I know to scream out will hurt my career. There's the spike in my tongue and the spike pierces in so much further for others. The consequences for speaking out would be so much worse for some folks in our spaces.

I find it hard to keep my rage in every time we point out that we'd like to opt in for people reusing our posts. Or to have my phone not try to send back my metadata to a centralised point.

When I express mild annoyance, I get the odd patronising reply guy message. “Well that's the way the world works, Honey, Don't you worry your purty little head about it. Now just shut up and take it.”

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. We aren't Maenads who don't understand how the Fediverse works. Nor are you developers Orpheus.

I find your song of code lacking, out of tune because of your privilege.

As you ask for us to be forgiving like Mummy and your friends pat you on the back because we were so mean. As your fellow developers and fanboys talk as if we had torn you apart.

Dude. There's a reason lots of us push back.

We claw our way out of the pit of our backgrounds, into the light to live, to exist, to organise. Then you lot decide to take a bunch of our public posts without our permission, you don't seem to understand we'd like some control over where our public posts go. Who we want to work with. [1]

The flippant answer of “duh just don't post,” is shallow. It's exclusionary. It shows how little danger you've had to face. How little abuse. How much you've bought into rape culture rather than consent culture. Silicon Valley is very much the result of White supremacy. The meritocracy is a myth. We're reaping the political consequences of believing that lie right now. Meanwhile, you witter on about your hurt feelings and how harsh that criticism was.

Girls. It's utterly feminine to feel that rage, that incandescence. It's feminine to want to lift that baseball bat and smash. It's also feminine to find the words to tell those developers, why it's wrong. Or like, just link to the Nexus Of Privacy's 8 tips for Fediverse Developers. Because I can guarantee most of them won't have read it. If they had, they would ask before launch if their project should be opt-in. [12]

And so we continue ad-nauseum.

The pushback against the opt-in, that need to reply-guy back comes from the same desire that the branks came from.

To shut up the marginalised. To humiliate them, to scold them back into compliance.

It's why I think WeDistribute punched down. That article was written from the desire to support the developer and push back against folks.
It's why they may not see it as punching down. They will probably see this as me punching down.

It's the desire by others to perpetuate the harassment that Folks face on the Fediverse for stating their boundaries loudly and clearly. To hide and re-frame the issues of harassment marginalised folks face. We're interfering with the Fediverse Utopia by stating our boundaries.

But I should be fair because the Devs aren't the only tech folks scolding the marginalised for requesting that their human rights be respected. You only have to look at the debate around alt text and see some high-profile accounts call folks “Scolds” when all they asked for was some alt text for a screenshot.

We all have work to do on this, on our biases to learn to listen and not react. I've spent a month not reacting. I'm still incredibly disappointed and angry.

I honestly expected better of my community. It was disappointing to read that article. It was disappointing to see someone I respected in tech go on about Scolds. Well done on dropping your mask on the ableism there. If you really can't be arsed doing the alt text for a screenshot or even asking for someone else to do the alt text for you, why bother with the picture? Well done on the punch down.

Sometimes I suspect that if the branks were around today, some of you would be the first folks to put it over my head. To slide the bit in, to tug on the bridle and break teeth. You'd take pleasure from me not being able to speak. To express my rage.

So yes, this is a scold.

The Internet form of the Scolds Bridle is politeness, it is tone policing. It is the threat of doxing and violence. For the same reasons, we disrupt the idea of the status quo. No one likes to be told they are harming others. [11]

We don't like the idea that we perpetuate harm, particularly in FOSS.

I'm tired that we have to protect our safety and justify our existence in public. I'm so tired of the fact that LGBTQ+ and BIPOC folk have to hold in that rage. Even if on occasion we do feel so angry there's almost a visceral need to tear “something apart” to burn it all down.

Oh hey, looks like the tech bros are doing it for us. What do you mean? Not that way?

I'm so tired and angry that our human rights are fucked and the SWF is happy to let Facebook into our spaces to determine how Activity Pub 2.0 should benefit Zuckerberg's creepy surveillance data hoarding to feed LLama.

I'm so tired of the rapey vibes I get from developers who would prefer us to opt out rather than consider building the opt-in. It's not that hard. It's what just my toots do. You look at my mastodon profile you see a link to just my toots. Which I opted into.

Why is it so hard for the Fedibros to get consent? Why do we keep having to do this? Holding in my rage is tiring. So I try to direct it, to use my rage at the world and to speak up for others if they haven't the energy at the moment to do so themselves. This post isn't my first scolding and nor will it be my last. [5 to 8]

If you're a guy and you're wondering what to do? Take a look at the culture around us. When you see your friends doing the reply guy thing? Call it out.

Is your friend doing some kind of Fediverse project that's a bridge? Ask questions, and ask them if they are going to make the service opt-in.

Keep calling out predatory behaviour, whether it's apps or real life. I know they are your friends, but if you're scared of losing their regard. They aren't your friends. You're their fanboy.

If you don't see what's wrong with their behaviour but you're feeling a bit attacked right now? Be brave, step back. Take a breath and listen to what folks are saying rather than reacting.

We are at a stage in history where we need to band together and I want to work with people who don't want to bridle me but to work with me.

Be braver. It's braver to take the hit to your idea of yourself, rather than punching down on the vulnerable.

Further reading

[1] https://cathode.church/fedi-scraper-counter.html

[2] https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/fedionfire-shutdown/

[3] https://allthatsinteresting.com/scolds-bridle

[4] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n06/mary-beard/the-public-voice-of-women

[5] Ignoring Boundaries https://www.onepict.com/20230906-boundaries.html

[6] Consent and the Fediverse https://www.onepict.com/consent-fediverse20230627.html

[7] Consent and the Fediverse part 2 https://www.onepict.com/consentpartdeux20240215.html

[8] On Bears https://www.onepict.com/20240506-bear.html

[9] UN report on STEM. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/02/1160041

[10] https://www.tastesofhistory.co.uk/post/about-history-the-scold-s-bridle

[11] https://youtu.be/BxQ15OEEuLM?si=30KIw8qWQpp5d797
Polite Women Are Not Safe – Parkrose Permaculture

[12] https://privacy.thenexus.today/consent-for-fediverse-developers/

[13] https://wedistribute.org/2024/07/fediverse-privacy-and-consent/

Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the fairest community of them all?

FOSDEM and Billionaire Fascists

Once upon a time in a land far away there was a FOSS Conference...

On Thursday the 16th of January Drew De Vault alerted the FOSS community that Jack Dorsey founder of Twitter, Bluesky (which he left as soon as they started doing limited Moderation) and Block (Blockchain company) was keynoting about Open Source culture and what it can bring to a company. [1]

This did not go down well in a community that prides itself on being an ethical community.

Yeah yeah, I hear some of you laughing.

The FOSDEM organisers scrambled to publish a post denying that Dorsey's company's sponsorship had anything to do with their accepting his submission for a Keynote.

Meanwhile one of the volunteers leaked the PreTalx voting session where only one of the reviewers scored it highly at a nine whereas the other reviewers gave the talk a very low score.

Oh no, they denied it. Talk slots cannot be bought. The sponsorship had nothing to do with it.

To be clear, in our 25 year history, we have always had the hard rule that sponsorship does not give you preferential treatment for talk selection; this policy has always applied, it applied in this particular case, and it will continue to apply in the future. Any claims that any talk was allowed for sponsorship reasons are false. [2]

Which may be true. Talk slots can indeed not be bought directly. But perhaps we need to take a look at some of the biases in our community. Perhaps we need to look at the soft power large sponsors have.

We need to look at the soft power and very real monetary power that an individual like Jack Dorsey has. Through Twitter, the idea of the town square became a de facto monopoly. When Twitter was sold to Elon Musk, he and the other shareholders earned an almost unimaginable amount of money from the sale.

His very story, his existence and his fellow alumni of the “Move Fast and Break Things” School of Technology, sits in the back of every Open Source technologist's mind. The idea of the startup, VCs and the money and power that comes with that.

For a conference that's meant to be about challenging the status quo of proprietary software, the organisers have missed the point. I think there's a disconnect between the organisers and some of the community.

Some of us, who were attracted to FOSS for explicitly ethical, and political reasons appear to have misunderstood what the movement was about.

We've woken from the dream. Reality seems rather harsh. We no longer believe in the fairy tale of FOSS.

Fairy Tales

In our community, we tell ourselves Fairy Tales.

That's not fair. As adults, we tell ourselves fairy tales all the time. We tell ourselves comforting lies about the way the world works.

As Terry Pratchett wrote in Hogfather :

” YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. “

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They're not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

In real life we allow ourselves to ignore the social injustice of the existence of Billionaires. The British King is a billionaire, Bill Gates is a billionaire, Taylor Swift is a billionaire. They not only have the power of Money. They have the power of influence, they can influence laws to ensure that they keep making money and retaining power.

There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. They profit from our labour and our misery. They pay money to their accountants to reduce their tax burden and to lobbyists to ensure they don't get taxed at all. The money they amass gains them more power and influence. In the meantime our healthcare systems struggle and people who want higher education or well health amass un-payable amounts of debt. Billionaires are the result of the economic and political policy changes over the last forty years that Milton Friedman aimed for when he wrote the tyranny of the Status Quo.

But we allow it because we hope that one day we will get lucky, win the lottery, get that awesome idea, and get that sweet sweet VC investment money.

I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians.
Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.
— John Steinbeck, “A Primer on the 30s”

In FOSS we tell ourselves the comforting lie that what we do is ethical. Merely by writing code and releasing it under an Open Source Licence.

FOSDEM Criticism

I was surprised that anyone thought the community would be happy about Jack Dorsey talking at FOSDEM. He's not exactly a hobbyist hacker. He's more known for palling around with Jay-Z and claiming that teaching poor folks about Bitcoin is financial literacy [5]

I mean, Jack Dorsey speaking about “Infusing Open Source Culture into Company DNA” when not a single soul has ever heard of him in relation to Open Source before this talk title would have worked as a joke to me. — Daniel Stenberg [6]

But perhaps we should not be surprised. For the immunocompromised, for those with a disability, FOSDEM is a no-go area. Which is where we really should hold the mirror up to all of us in FOSS.

For a long time, FOSDEM resisted the idea of a code of conduct. It has no meaningful health policy. Plus as Anna e só noted when they were a keynote speaker very little accommodation for their disabilities was made available.

Oh, and addressing Jack Dorsey’s presence at FOSDEM: I invite you all to think about it as a symptom of something bigger happening at FOSDEM, not as an issue in and of itself. The mobility issues, the grim logistics of watching talks in person, the difficulty in connecting with others in crowded spaces, the “let it rip” attitude when talking about flu or COVID—those are a part of a whole that tells a story, and this is an invitation to think about how we can do better as a community in general. — Anna e só [7]

Garret Le Sage had some interesting points about other barriers to accessibility for everyone at FOSDEM.

#FOSDEM:

is inaccessible for those with:

• mobility issues
• scent sensitivities (no policy against perfume, uses smelly soap in bathrooms); this affects around 30% of the population
• who need/want CC for videos

And refused:

• to have a code of conduct for years; have no real means of enforcing the one they have now
• to implement any kind of sickness mitigation (COVID, “FOSDEM Flu”, or other), including encouraging masks and ventilation

And promotes: – cryptocurrency
– billionaires

#FOSDEM does do a lot of good too, bringing people together and promoting Free Software. And there are amazing people putting together the event every year — especially the tons of volunteers spending their time and effort to make this all happen.

But promoting the ideals of Free and Open Source Software is all the more reason they should really respect their audience, be inclusive, and try to be better.

(People critical of FOSDEM aren't attacking it; we all want it to be better.) — Garrett LeSage [8]

I don't like what I see in the mirror's reflection

Around Mastodon, I've seen criticism of this stance from folks on various tech-flavoured instances. Folks giving the temporarily embarrassed millionaire vibes or feeling judged because something they love and enjoy going to is getting such harsh criticism.

FOSDEM with its history of sponsorship is the reason why OFFDEM exists.

Why does it exist?

Some free software developers have been unhappy with the takeover of the community event by corporate sponsors from Silicon Valley’s surveillance capitalism. Since there was no way to reform the original gathering, we decided to fork FOSDEM. [9]

Consider going to OFFDEM. A lot is going on this year. [10]

FOSDEM has a long history of siding with the status quo. Those of us at the edges don't really count. Not in the organising committee and sadly it appears not in the wider community. We can't even get people to consider wearing masks in solidarity and advocating for clean air. [11]

So let's get to the real meat of the situation. FOSDEM is not the only conference or the only organisation with this problem. [12], [13], [14]

We see the issues in real life and online with various community controversies that crop up from time to time. FOSS is littered with the debris of abusers and our inability to look in the mirror and see that it starts with us.

Our complicity in the status quo. Our complicity in abuse because the abusers do good work. In tech we appear to have a serious problem with understanding consent and why opt-in even on our public posts is the moral thing to do.

We don't consider how the technology we create can harm others' human rights and their democracies. We don't want to acknowledge our complicity in this abuse.

We aren't prepared to sacrifice for our principles. But when there are a lot of folks facing hardship from layoffs and disability perhaps it's time to consider that one day you may be in that position looking for mutual aid.

You are never going to be a billionaire. Let go of that fairytale.

So what can FOSDEM do

Well as others have pointed out can the talk.

Yes, Jack Dorsey will make a fuss and probably get to go on lots of right-wing shows crying about the marketplace of free ideas and how his free speech is being harmed.

I keep reminding folks that you need to twin Article 19 of the UCHR with Article 20 which is freedom of association. Which is what some folks are asking for.

We want the freedom to not have a billionaire trying to grift our young ones into a wasteful planet-burning technology so that Dorsey can amass more money and more power. We want to go to a conference with clean air in an accessible venue.

If the sponsorship isn't tied to Jack Dorsey giving the talk, well then it should be easy enough, shouldn't it?

Another thing that FOSDEM can do is be more transparent in it's procedures and spell out explicitly what the sponsor money is spent on. Make it really easy to find.

What can I do?

Perhaps the best thing that the organisers of FOSDEM and the attendees can do is take a long hard look at the mirror that some of us are holding up to you.

Understand the harsh reflection on the comforting lies you told yourself about Free Software and Open Source Software. Understand the corruption within the community and within yourself. Look at the scars that our society from its origins in White Supremacy and Colonialism inflicts on us and minorities.

Understand your own ableism and consider who's missing. Try not to see my mild pleas for a safe spot in Europe that I can go to and present at as criticism of all of your life choices up to now. I'm not an outsider, I presented at FOSDEM in 2020 in the decentralisation and privacy room. I'm ill now. I miss people and giving them bosies if they are into that sort of thing. [15]

I can't currently travel safely to a big city in the wintertime or anytime really. I'm not alone in the isolation. Others are having to take serious life-changing risks because conferences are where they can make the connections to help their careers.

At the moment many of us in Tech risk sacrificing our health and our family's health for our careers. Because very few able-bodied people want to make the small sacrifice of boycott or even masking up. No one is prepared to advocate for us for our health and safety.

Because what's happening in the physical FOSS community is a microcosm of our wider society. If I can't convince folks who believe that FOSS is the ethical alternative to proprietary technology to mask and advocate for community health and safety. What chance do I have to convince the rest of society?

But perhaps the idea of Jack Dorsey talking at FOSDEM offends you. So here's a small, really inoffensive way that you can protest this.

Go to Drew's sit-in. A Sit-in is one of the most inoffensive forms of protest that we have. Drew's not even asking for yelling. Just sitting peacefully on the stage to prevent Jack Dorsey from going on the stage.

I do not want to platform Jack Dorsey on this stage. To that end, I am organizing a sit-in, in which I and anyone who will join me are going to sit ourselves down on the Janson stage during his allocated time slot and peacefully prevent the talk from proceeding as scheduled. We will be meeting at 11:45 AM outside of Janson, 15 minutes prior to Dorsey’s scheduled time slot. Once the stage is free from the previous speaker, we will sit on the stage until 12:30 PM. Bring a good book. If you want to help organize this sit-in, or just let me know that you intend to participate, please contact me via email; I’ll set up a mailing list if there’s enough interest in organizing things like printing out pamphlets to this effect, or even preparing an alternative talk to “schedule” in his slot. — Drew De Vault – No billionaires at FOSDEM

Billionaires who jet around the world grifting the fruits of our labour from us need some more friction in their lives.

Be that grit. Be ungovernable.

The first thing you need to do is take a long hard look in the mirror. Yes, it is a harsh reflection. It will hurt.

But our community and the people who are missing desperately need you to look. You can't change or improve the world if you won't see that you're part of the problem.

We will help you. But you need to wake up from the spell you're under.

Understand what you see in your reflection. Then we can start to work together.

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/16/2025-01-16-No-Billionares-at-FOSDEM-please.html

[2] https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4507-infusing-open-source-culture-into-company-dna-a-conversation-with-jack-dorsey-and-manik-surtani-block-s-head-of-open-source/

[3] https://fosdem.org/2025/news/2025-01-16-protests/

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/series/cost-of-the-crown

[5] https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/10/23162314/jay-z-jack-dorsey-bitcoin-academy-brooklyn-free-classes

[6] https://mastodon.social/@bagder/113843673151493774

[7] https://friend.camp/@anna/113844191308154319

[8] https://mastodon.xyz/@garrett/113842951885650493

[9] https://offdem.net/

[10]https://oxygen.offdem.net/t/no-billionnaires-at-fosdem/463

[11] https://www.onepict.com/20230124-cobbles.html

[12]https://www.onepict.com/20230123-cobbles.html

[13]https://www.onepict.com/20230703-cobbles.html

[14]https://www.onepict.com/20230917-rotten.html

[15]https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/view/id/4624