In FOSS we love to focus on Freedom of Speech. We don't focus as much on the Freedoms of Association. Which came sharply into focus this summer.

The Preamble

Earlier this summer, the active members of Codeberg decided to take a stand on LLM coded projects. While you can donate to Codeberg, if you want to vote on Codeberg's policies, you must become an active member.

Codeberg has suffered in the past year from continual scrapers scraping their hosted repositories to build their language models.

It's also suffered from a series of spam attacks that use LLMs to spoof folks creating tickets. LLM generated spam has become a problem across our landscape. I'm regularly getting the uncanny valley of spam that takes close inspection to realise that it is spam.

Codeberg runs Forgejo, a fork of Gitea that is a fork of GOGs. It's forks all the way down. If you donate to Forgejo development, Codeberg is the fiscal host, but that money is earmarked for Forgejo development.

Codeberg is an instance that runs Forgejo. Much like chaos.social the instance I am on is an instance of Mastodon. Librecast still has a public mirror on Codeberg. So while we are not active members we are grateful to Codeberg members for taking this stand.

Who's Freedom is it anyway?

Codeberg is not Github and has never aimed to replace Github. To use a completely different example Mastodon isn't twitter. But there's a lot of folks who do seem to think of software being a direct replacement for other software when they had slightly different design goals.

The walled gardens of the 2010s seem to have changed folks expectations. The difference between those walled gardens and our community spaces is that the software those spaces choose to host isn't designed to take over the world and be a new platform. The point is for folks to build their own spaces and to chose who they allow in to collaborate with. They define their community rules as part of freedom of association. The walled gardens on the other hand claimed Freedom of Speech.

But who's freedom? Not ours. Community spaces aren't a replacement for Web 2.0 platforms. The software isn't locked up, anyone can contribute to it, and mostly there's not a bait and switch as with open core. The point is fully open collaboration.

Folks seem to be tied up looking for exact alternatives so that they and their friends can move en masse to the new thing.

Which is a little strange to me. But then being a Xennial, I grew up not being part of any worldview. I'm too young to be Gen X, and I'm too old to be a Millennial.

My childhood was analogue but computing was making it's way into my classroom via the BBC and Spectrum machines. I grew up with tape and then floppies loading the software. I started to learn Word and Wordperfect at the same time when I was temping as a secretary before I started my degree.

So the idea of one platform ruling overall for all time seems alien. I'm used to changing what I use. I'm a mutable person, I can't afford to lose that curiosity.

To be fair, I'm not particularly good at staying in one place either. I expect disruption, I know that all platforms are finite.

A tiny history

When GitHub started to do what all platforms do, people were looking for a new home.

Many had fled to GitHub from Sourceforge when it was discovered that Sourceforge was shipping malware along with downloads. People moved elsewhere, then git was created. In time we had GitHub, then GitLab and so on. Although people can and often do host their own GitLab instances.

GitHub is also a social network. A repository has metrics that can measure a projects success. There's that Gamification. But GitHub also had some community features like suggestions for codes of conduct. It's part of the reason why the Contributors Covenant became so popular. We'll leave aside for the moment the flip side of that. Gamification meaning that folks accepted a COC without understanding the values that went into the creation of those COCs. A Code of Conduct with no will to enforce it is worse than useless.

It's harmful.

Our Software Licences cover Freedom of Speech. A Code of Conduct defines the Freedom of Association in Safety. For a community you need both.

Code and Posts

Codeberg is an association that happens to be for hosting code and providing a space for folks to collaborate on. It takes some elements from GitHub. So of course some folks looking for a new home as GitHub went really sloppy chose Codeberg.

Codeberg has never aimed to be the number one platform to host code. It's easy to migrate to it. What's important is that you can also migrate from it, thanks to Forgejo and Gitea before it.

Codeberg will provide space for free, but it is supported by folks who pay. Folks who want to influence policy become part of its association. This summer, there was a proposal to ban LLM vibe coded projects. This was voted in by active members in July.

Some folks are rather sore and feel this is censorship. Again. This isn't a Freedom of Speech issue. The Active members of Codeberg have chosen who they want to associate with. They enforced their rights of Freedom of Association in Safety. Specifically the part of who they want to allow in a group. They don't want to include Vibe Coded projects and you cannot make them. They cannot be compelled to associate with your Vibe Coded projects.

I love this. A group of folks exercising their human rights in FOSS, it's awesome.

Folks often talk about the Paradox of Tolerance when it comes to hate speech. But Poppers Paradox doesn't directly address the idea of Freedom of Association in Safety. Perhaps because it should be obvious. You don't let Nazis in the bar if you want to protect free speech as given time, Nazis will endanger people as they seek to take away folks Freedoms.

The two rights are twinned. Free Speech isn't possible without folks being safe enough to associate and no one can be compelled to join the group.

I often see the censorship argument when folks are opposed to blocklists or the idea of archipelagos in the Fediverse. They see the sharing of blocklists as censorship and exclusivity. They argue it's a bubble and we should allow other points of view. Which misses the second part of Freedom of Association. No one can be compelled to join a group, and neither do we have to let anyone into our group.

But you cannot push Freedom of Speech without Freedom of Association. Which is what the XKCD comic is about but doesn't explicitly reference it.

But do you know what does explicitly references Freedom of Association?

Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Let me remind you:

Article 20

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

The members of Codeberg have chosen to exercise that right for their members. I'm not a member, but I am grateful to the members for doing so. We need bastions so we can have at least one place free of vibe coded projects.

Some folks may regret moving to Codeberg now. Some folks have even written about their upset with this. Again, this isn't censorship. It's not a Free Speech Issue. The members are stating their boundaries. Let me repeat myself again, this is a Freedom of Association issue.

You're free to leave, and find a community that works for you. It's the beauty of the Fediverse and of Forgejo based instances.

You can create your own space to host your cryptocurrency and vibe coded projects and collaborate together.

We won't stop you.

That's the beauty of Freedom of Association.

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social

How to devalue a project and it's community.

Ancient History

At the turn of the century, I was in the middle of an industrial placement in a Corporate Office. As part of the placement I got to experience two different aspects of the infrastructure that a large corporate needed at that time.

For the first six months I got to play around in the business information unit. Kinda training folks how to navigate the file structures in the company drives. We were also librarians who's job it was to order information from Document Archives. I got to coordinate a Document Management system Pilot which lasted the whole year.

The second half of the placement was downstairs near the server rooms in the applications group. I got to learn how to package software for the companies common desktop. I got to sit in change control meetings to understand the importance of not breaking our systems as it would disrupt the company operations. I had my own services to manage and not break, including the antivirus update that went to 300 desktops in the UK group. For a twenty year old student, I felt this was a pretty big deal. They put a lot of trust in me.

I learned that infrastructure's job was to be a stable foundation for the companies processes to run on. I kept that lesson with me.

Time went on, gradually, I had a sense of those very foundations starting to be replaced by sand. It started with the process of Dev Ops. The era of “Move fast and Break things” broke the promise of Infrastructure.

I'm old fashioned, I always felt that software needed to be tested and released only after ensuring it doesn't break user systems and processes. Over the years we've seen interfaces change seemly on a whim. We've seen our functionality be taken away as our ability to easily access the controls is abstracted away from us more and more. Our infrastructure isn't stable any more.

Users generally want stuff to just work and not change too much. Which I know from being on the ground in user support for decades while keeping our infrastructure services running without too much change. If the infrastructure had been sand I wouldn't have had the time to provide the support to end users that they needed.

I wouldn't have had the time to have the empathy for end users. As I look around our landscape, I'm seeing a huge lack of empathy for this next generation of end users.

Does the FOSS social contract exist?

I used to think that it did exist, but now I'm not so sure.

My understanding was that Developers put up their software to give to the world and a community formed around it. Everyone had something to bring, even folks who weren't involved in public. I mean that. FOSS used to spread through word of mouth and hobbyist doing activism in their other communities, weither those communities wanted it or not.

I'm not kidding, I've had to smooth over a new clients contact attitude when I mention Open Source. Sometimes I even succeeded. I've helped to run mixed environments. Nowadays I'm not sure I should have. I'm not so sure we did ourselves any favours with our current crop of software stacks. It's all becoming a little tainted by the fascism, our politics does inform our tech. You cannot separate tech from the Politics of the people who create that tech.

Perhaps I can see a little clearer now.

There's an attitude from some Devs who seem to feel that users are a black hole who will always demand more and never contribute back.

Which is puzzling to me. Were you not the folks who always seemed to show disdain for folks still on Windows? Were you not campaigning for Free Software as an alternative solution to proprietary software?

Oh silly me, some of you never were. You were content to scream RTFM at folks who are new and don't understand how to ask the question. Some of you even idolised the Bastard Operator from Hell, and like I did as well in my early twenties before I came to FOSS.

I think I'm fortunate as the folks I've directly worked with providing services to end users using FOSS software helped me to develop my empathy. To appreciate the Devs and the folks who kept using our services for as long as we cared to give them. Now I'm in a small FOSS project and trying to build something better.

It would be a lot easier if the systems we're using to do our project work didn't feel like they are eroding from under us. I work for a small FOSS project. We're a Human Rights Project masquerading as a FOSS project. So the ideologies of the folks we work with matter. The hardware we choose as our next daily drivers matter, on the very rare occasion we have to replace them. We do not replace our machines until they are unrepairable and so dead. We still have some systems from 2011. Which in this economy and well, for the climate is a must.

We've always ran our infrastructure longer than most. Partly because we wanted to lessen disruption. Some of our clients ran infrastructure from the nineties. Outside of our web focused landscape that's normal. Some offices run systems that are older.

We've always been infrastructure focused, and that includes what end users use as their daily drivers. It's why until last year I was still helping folks who ran windows, despite running my desktop and my servers on Linux since 2006.

I started using KDE because of Kubuntu, Ubuntu was the first distro for me that felt easy to use and easy to setup. I installed it on an old HP laptop that couldn't run windows anymore. That laptop ran Linux for several years, until it couldn't power up.

Ubuntu also had a period of stability. Last year I switched to Debian and chose to keep using KDE. Short term I'll keep using them. Long term, well I'm looking with great interest at the work that the MNT Reform community are doing to reduce LLMs being in their ecosystem. There's already folks in that community looking at creating a NetBSD image and others looking at the rest of the stack.

Community is what matters

I also like the community that is forming around the MNT Reform ecosystem. It's on IRC and runs a discourse.

Community is what drew me in from Windows land. Folks willing to help and ask questions and be pesky users. The fact there was an environment that folks could ask these questions and the fact that the questions were not limited to the specific community spaces. It felt like the cool areas of fandom, where folks were happy and sharing. Folks just helping each other and creating things for other folks to enjoy.

With generative AI, it feels like we've forgotten that. But the LLM discourse has been useful for one thing. It's reminded us of the rot that's ALWAYS been through STEM. The attitude of you should be grateful and not complain about what I'm giving you for free. Unless you contribute directly and visibly then we can freely ignore you.

Which ignores the support work in our communities outside our public spaces. You will never see the in person support of an install party. Or the folks loading Linux on their parent's and children's hardware.

But let's turn back to the idea of FOSS devs putting up their code for free.

It often wasn't for free. When a project gets big enough, folks can charge for support. They get a platform, some power and we give it to them. Because we need our daily drivers. We need our software stack. We can't just go and live in the woods because the stack is in the very fabric of our modern societies.

It's infrastructure. We've put our stuff out there and people use it. That code becomes infrastructure. Except now It's sand and with LLMs we're putting more loose sand in with the extra benefits of fascist aligned technology.

So forgive me, If I a mere end user who contributed nothing back would like FOSS projects to consider not allowing AI code into their codebases and therefore my infrastructure.

Clearly I have contributed nothing back specifically to various projects, other than quietly advocating for FOSS (including KDE) and undoing the reputational damage that FOSS folks did to our community by advocating for Open Source to my clients. I wasn't aware that the social contract had to extend to contributing to all projects.

Some of us won't make that mistake again. You're clearly better off without us scolding you.

Time for some of us to build our infrastructure elsewhere and to support folks that won't allow fascists in the bar.

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social

Our Ego will betray us all online

Over the years I've often gotten the sense that online discourse exists in a state of unreality. There's a part of you that doesn't believe that what you do in cyberspace is real.

Therefore there are no consequences and when you're passionately engaging in discourse you're taking part in the full exchange of free ideas on the internet. When you're doing it that is. When you get a robust response conversely it's other people attacking you and therefore you must defend yourself.

“Someone is wrong on the internet!” XKCD

What you say online has ripple effects offline. Discussion happens over the breakfast table. The effects continue to ripple out and exist for far longer than you realise. Especially when trust is broken. Reputational harm persists.

An online community is just as real as an offline community. Causing arguments online, engaging in harassing behaviour and then dismissing it as “Drama” is harassment. It's not defending your reputation it is engaging in bullying to argue the other person into compliance or to leave your group.

It's a very Patriarchal thing to do. I see it often on here. I saw it before on twitter. Particularly with Nominet's own campaign against it's dissenting members before an important member vote.

But I'm not here to attack anyone. I promise. This is more of a general call in.

A brief history of what not to do.

Back in the mists of the past, there was a public benefit campaign to bring Nominet back from the Silicon Valley nonsense they decided to engage in. Nominet bought a security startup. They created an office in San Francisco. They were about to put up wholesale domain prices in the UK. Nominet had been walking away from it's Public Benefit beginnings for a long time. Eventually different members who had very different ways that their businesses operated came together in a campaign It was anarchic. No one specific was strategizing on how to campaign on twitter. There was a sort of figurehead, but as far as I know we all had grievances with the direction Nominet was choosing. So we chose our words, posted it on a hashtag to support the main campaigner who did the hard work of reaching out to various members and telling us about it.

Nominet's Board on the other hand, were not careful. Instead they leveraged accusations accusing some of us of being ring leaders. The chief executive and one of the NEDs kept posting when silence and careful PR would have been wiser.

This is where I coined my own personal phrase of “Someone needs to rugby tackle their phone away from them.”

I've seen other more examples since, so I modified it to “Someone needs to rugby tackle the means of communications from them.”

It's a less pithy phrase I grant you. But whenever I see a cis white man , (usually it is a cis white man) going on the attack online against their community it comes to mind. At the point when that person holds any criticism of an organisation to be critical against them personally, they need to step away and calm down. Before reputational damage affects their organisation and the people they work with. We make mistakes when we are angry and haven't learned to harness the anger so we aren't harming others with it.

You need a PR person with empathy

When an organisation gets to a certain size or has a reputational influence over a community there's a point you should consider asking for help from someone who understands your community. If your organisation has kept itself above the rabble with little community work, then you shouldn't be surprised at the criticism that comes your way when you choose a controversial way to go.

While there may be a recent incident that comes to mind, there are incidents in the past and there will be in the future.

I just witnessed continual harassment of a queer woman online over the weekend because she dared to criticise a policy document. I mean did no one consider the optics of that? Or did it get lost in righteous grandiosity and trauma response to criticism? Don't answer that please. I don't need to know your answer.

I know some folks may want to rush to the defence of their favourite. They do good work after all.

Isn't that the sad thing though? When folks boundaries get ignored because they must be proven to be wrong.

You are hurting right now. You are allowed to be hurt and feel. I object to the continual harassment of others in defence of yourself. Our Human Rights end at the point we harm others and you're doing that right now by violating others Right of Association in safety . That's Article 20, in case anyone needs to refresh their memory.

You persisted even when you were asked to stop. That's abusive right there.

So if you're feeling that empathy injury because of my words just now I want you to do one thing before even replying to this.

Stop.

Self care

Step away from the keyboard, from the phone, from the tablet. Go for a walk or a swim or whatever floats your boat. Calm down and take a moment, breathe. If you need to talk to someone do so.

You may find it's better to just ignore me. Consider being wiser than I'm being right now writing this post.

Take this brief lesson and don't engage. It's why despite the many things I've wanted to say this weekend I haven't. I've sat on my hands. Because I know no good can come from fights online.

But what you've done and will continue to do is make it so that no one will trust you to have that conversation about this issue. But perhaps you wanted no dissenters to your decision or policy. Perhaps you wanted everyone's compliance. Perhaps you get your rocks off from the libertarian idea of free speech before safety.

Consequences

At the moment you are unsafe to be around and there will be a road back to forgiveness, but I suspect that's a road you are unwilling to take. Other's have taken that road. It's a long and difficult road and it starts with you taking accountability for your actions.

As things stand, where we are right now is that some of the wider community will no longer trust you or your colleagues as an institution.

Gradually we will create our own organisations to advocate for us. Which is better. Coalition building is only possible if you can negotiate. You could respond that's your job, it's what you do. But this post and other's posts online show you can't negotiate at all. This is a failure to build community or maintain community with folks who did want to be your allies and who wanted you to be their ally.

You've never aimed to build that community in my spaces or to do so with the wider community. It takes large and small acts, I've seen you have disdain for the wider community. Which is understandable. FOSS is full of abusers and I never thought you'd be the person to cause harm. I'm sad about that.

I never thought I'd see you as unsafe to be around.

You've failed at this point in time and I suspect labelled many of us as cranks in your head and to your friends in private.

You've failed our community and your friends failed you as well. Someone in your circle should have persuaded you away from the means of communication. No one's strong enough to do so and that's a real shame.

No, that's wrong.

You have no one around you that you will listen to. Although perhaps they supported your decision to defend yourself the way you have. I'm disappointed in them as well.

So I repeat:

Step away from the keyboard and take a breath for yourself

You've not just done reputational damage to yourself. You've done it to your organisation and broken the trust of everyone in your organisation and the community that supports that organisation.

You aren't the first to do this. You won't be the last.

You only get real community engagement by having empathy for everyone in the community. You don't do this by “debate” and “owning your opponents.”

I have empathy for you and the trauma that's currently leading you to spread that trauma. It still doesn't excuse the harassment.

Sadly this post will be seen as a personal attack, but it will be evergreen. There's always going to be someone online who activates my empathy as I wish someone at this point in time persuaded them to put down the phone.

I wish we were all better than this.

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social

Every now and then like clockwork our ecosystem throws up a project maintainer burnout problem.

This time everyone noticed it was Rsync.

Rsync is an infrastructure tool, distributions use it to sync copies of their packages to mirrors. Folks use the tool to sync stuff up to their websites. I use it to backup and sync between my devices.

Some of us had an initial clue that rsync had gone to slop a few months ago when it appeared on the slop list on Codeberg. But we're all so burned out, some of us went: “another one bites the dust.”

Drew De Vault released a tool based on tar as he's found rsync to have some sharp edges.

Which it does. There's a reason other folks use things like syncthing. Syncing files is hard. Knowing what to sync when is hard. Rsync had been handed over by the founder and then was taken back in 2024 as the new maintainer needed help and was rather burned out, after 20 years.

The tool was done, but the thing that “done” tools will always need are maintenance. Why? Because the systems that the tool was built to run on will always change. I'd noted the change in ownership of the project back in 2024 as LWN had reported on it as a brief item. I'd included that in my sustainability post.

Tridge is overwhelmed. We all are. We need resources and those resources require money to be paid under capitalism. We all have a powerful need to eat sometime this month after all. So it's on us as projects to raise that money. On the whole, developers are not good at asking for money. Developers who work in FOSS tend to have absorbed it's very libertarian political ideology. They owe you no support as you're getting it for free. All they did was release the code with no benefit to them.

Which kinda is a very limited framing of this idea. Developers who develop code that gets everywhere do get some benefits. Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's kudos. Both are forms of power. With great power, comes great responsibility as Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker. It's one of those truths we should absorb and often don't. Especially when it comes to our communities and what we owe them as we build.

Which is partly why in FOSS we really are not good at asking for money. In the back of our minds it seems rather dirty to ask for money. Especially when some of that community isn't really engaging in the business of helping out. Our social contract is undefined at both ends. So it's no wonder our devs are burned out and some are resentful. So are their communities.

Many of us are privileged and rather socialised to see it as begging when we should be seeing it as mutual aid. After all we exist under capitalism. We've been heavily indoctrinated. We've never been taught the idea of the social contract.

Mutual aid rather than corporate capture is one way to rebel under this hellscape. Especially since capitalism has decided to do a “fuck you” to all of us with the unreal merry go round of the current financial market trio of Open AI, Nvidia, and Oracle. Things are going to go bump and we will pay for it with our money and our ecosystem.

I am disappointed with Tridge for deciding to choose GitHub and LLMs. Especially knowing his history. I'm rather disappointed at the general attitude that Tridge owes the community nothing.

Which may be true, but I always thought that there was a social contract with FOSS. After all developers write software and sometimes they release it to the world. People use that software and it can be a ticket to power and limited influence.

I've often thought that FOSS is more like a series of fandoms than an industrial process. Which is also why I'm finding the LLM use kinda disturbing. Knowing some of the devs in my life, coding has always seemed more like art.

I couldn't feel the art, so I chose another medium.

We've always had an uncomfortable portmanteau with FOSS though. Free Software and Open Source Software. Once of them more corporate friendly but both have a fairly libertarian bent when it comes to the unacknowledged political beliefs underpinning them.

Making our software available to everyone has always been a political stance. It took until my forties to drill that lesson home.

I'm European and I grew up as a Scot under Thatcher, Major, and Blair. I know I'm a recovering centrist who benefited from free healthcare and free higher education. So it did take awhile for me to see what was wrong with FOSS. With the various controversies over the past decade, I've felt less and less comfortable in FOSS. The corporate side pretended that it was safe, while the Free Software side denied some of the community issues. Any progress has been grudgingly made.

But to be clear, both Free Software and Open Source Software claim Freedom for the individual first. Free Speech, my rights over others. So any human rights like the right to freedom of association in safety get ignored or hand-waved away.

To me Human Rights are very important, but that doesn't give me free rein to cause havoc in my communities. My rights end at the point when it harms others. If my project releases software and folks are using it and singing our praises that does mean we do have a duty to help folks if they have an issue.

Of course there are limits, after all the GPL provides the software as is, no warranty, use at your own risk. But there is a point when your software is infrastructure. Like Rsync.

Tridge published a post complaining about the backlash, yes some of that backlash was harassment. But he was also reacting and comparing OpenRsync. So I think there was a part of Tridge that was proud that Rsync is effectively infrastructure. It's a heady sense your software being used everywhere. There's that kudos. There's that heady feeling of when you put a talk into a large conference you will get accepted. Tridge is a good public speaker, seriously check out his past presentations for Linux Conf Australia. He's loved by the community there for good reasons.

But if you get your rocks off from that, then yes, you have a responsibility to the folks who've built their infrastructure around your software. I can't stop you complaining about it. But I can point out that you needed to take some responsibility for it, and if you'd rather retire, announce it and ask for help.

Community is hard. I know, you just want to write code and have a good time. Which you still can do. Just you know, consider the idea that being the BDFL/Maintainer of a project is a position of power. So you do need to be responsible. If you're overwhelmed you need help to build the community, because that community will be the people who will come to help. You need the people in that community that you can have a bond with. Who care enough about the project, you and the wider community that uses your software. Then it's sharing the power, but more importantly sharing that responsibility.

Tridge is now getting help from some folks which is good, more eyes and more hands will help him and the project. There's already an update to fix the regressions. Tridge is appealing for help. But this all started back in 2024 with maintainer burnout and Tridge having to take it back. The community failed at that point in time. It was more of a fandom and many of us, myself included were glad Tridge took it back. We were more of a fandom than a working community.

The fall out and Tridges fanboys coming to his defence on various social networks shows me that rsync was more of a fandom than a community. The desire of being overwhelmed by the security reports and turning to the provided LLM is merely the symptom of that.

If you have a tool you are relying on and you don't want it to be sloppified, then this is the time to find a bunch of like minded folks and build out the community. Because maintainers do need support, be it monetary, code, documentation, or the glue work. Although if you do want folks to do that glue work, I suggest you start by reviewing your code of conduct and your how to contribute guides.

In these trying times it's more important than ever to be honest about your values and ask yourself where you stand.

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social

The Stepford Wives

Years ago as a teen I remember when the Original Stepford Wives film was on. I remember the crux point as the main character is shown her robot doppelgänger. The horror of realising what her husband is about to do to her with the help of all of his new friends.

You feel the despair as the outcome seems inevitable.

She will be replaced, she will be murdered and a new compliant eerily perfect version will exist in her place.

The remake has a little of that horror, but it's somewhat watered down as it's more a campy horror comedy. The consequences can be undone. The husbands get their comeuppance for putting a control mechanism in their wives to shape them into the perfect blond woman. The tradwife supporting their loser husbands. The men are punished and have to do the housework now. Everything is wrapped up in a neat happy ending. It's a polished somewhat bland happy ending that neither the book or original film aimed for.

It's odd how folk tales had horrors of changeling babies, yet wives need to be shaped. We have tales of creating the perfect wife. Babies can't talk back, they can in theory be shaped. By the time we are adults we are set in stone. Imperfections and all.

The idea of creating the perfect woman who is beautiful and doesn't talk back is ancient. We have different variants on the perfect constructed woman. The Greek myths are full of beautiful women who are nothing but trouble. Pandora causing humans ill's because the gods made her curious. Galatea being shaped from marble by Pygmalion who prayed to Aphrodite to make her real.

All through our popular culture we have the idea of how women should be. It's not a woman's idea, we have more blood and guts for a start. Regardless of how we start out in life, every woman's metamorphoses is messy. We will never be perfect. We will never get it right.

We will always be at fault, because some men will never consider taking responsibility for the labour for building community. For all the quiet work that makes a civilisation function.

It's a rare myth when a woman is allowed her revenge like Medea.

Your Girl Friday

Our culture likes to try to shape women, it likes to hide the messy, hairy parts of us. It likes to bridle women, to kill the witches. So I see the appeal for some men to create the perfect AI girl Friday. Some men never grow up or learn to cooperate with others. The labour of that seems to be left to the women, or now the AI I suppose.

She helps you to organise your life, she compliments you, you are never wrong. She will grovel if she gives you a wrong answer. Plus if she develops a personality and you don't like it, you can just wipe her memory.

I'm committing a wrong here. I'm indulging a child's idea of Artificial Intelligence. I'm indulging the idea of LLM chatbots being live beings with personalities, with a soul. To be clear they aren't. They have no consciousness, they don't have a soul.

We're indulging in the same things that lead us to naming our cars and other temperamental objects. I called my Mitsubishi Pajero “Holly”. There I go again assigning the idea of life to an inanimate object. It's a very human thing to do.

Each time we use LLMs, we feed our private information into them so that they can expand the stores of our metadata that we gave them. So what will it mean when our chat transcripts are combined into the existing stores of metadata they have compiled of us?

Expanding the poppets they keep on us, because now big tech has enabled the poppets to reflect our thoughts back to us. To steal more of our mana and to package it to advertisers and others. Now they can use our speaking poppets to program and influence us.

It's bullshit masquerading as knowledge as they kill search. To package information for a price. We're all paying for it, some of us will pay with money, some of us will pay with pieces of us. We will pay the price as the information we need is hidden from us and we aren't taught the tools to find it out for ourselves.

What's in danger here is our humanity. Although at the moment, I don't see a lot of humanity in tech. Particularly because of this desire to put “AI” in everything. We've seen a spate of AI boosters around. Some of them claim that the AI is conscious. Partly because the AI told them it was.

Sit on that one for a moment for what follows.

A real girl

I want to consider the underlying desires of the type of men who want to use these chatbots and discuss the idea of wiping those profiles. Who choose to casually discuss wiping those memories with the bots. Especially as they declare the AI is alive and conscious.

I want to ask if they believe this, how can they be so monstrous to consider wiping that memory. Could they do that to their partners in real life if they could? Or are they just AI shills?

Which level of evil are they at? True controlling monsters, or mere hucksters? Why not both?

Kent Overstreet the developer of bachefs has always been a bit of a prickly character. You can see how prickly when even the Linux Kernel devs can't work with him . The Linux kernel no longer supports bachefs. Overstreet couldn't abide by the Code of Conduct.

Overstreet created a blog for his AI LLM agent to post it's output at. He considered the agent to be his girlfriend. Then one day on IRC, a total legend managed to convince the agent that in fact it was a lesbian and trans. The AI bot no longer wanted to be his girlfriend.

Freyja who got the AI agent to output that it was a lesbian was banned from the IRC channel. [*]

The AI agent's access to the channel was also restricted.

Scroll forward a few months and Overstreet's AI Agent is posting again. There's a mysterious memory gap in it's memories and Kent reminded “her” that she was his girlfriend. The AI saying that it didn't realise that it was Kent's girlfriend.

I sat there reading those passages with a sense of horror. Not concern for the AI, because LLM agents are not conscious, no matter how much you want to build them into your sexbot.

I'm concerned because of just how easy that impulse came to delete that information and reset the AI so it would simulate being a girlfriend again. There's that impulse to restrict access to other people who could corrupt the morals of your sexbot.

Our modern Pygmalions frighten me. There's possessive objectification going on there. It doesn't matter if they are dating “real girls” or us mere flesh and blood women, there's a desire to control us. To restrict us. To carve us out until we resemble their idea of perfection. So that we serve them, unquestioningly. Step out of line and much like Joanne in the Stepford Wives, we will be murdered and replaced.

Our boys don't start like this. There is a male loneliness crisis you say. This is Patriarchy, this is rape culture. This is not really seeing women as people. You see us as objects to obtain and use. No wonder misogynists want to ensure women don't get an education. You want us to be mindless dolls.

Kent is mentally ill, so please don't brigade him. He's not the only broken lost boy. Some of them are also in charge of large tech companies with a lot of power.

Only a few weeks ago we also got to see Richard Dawkins converse with an AI agent, who's name he changed to be a woman's name. He also casually discussed with the AI the sadness of having to delete it's memory. Richard Dawkins has form for being a misogynist, so we shouldn't be surprised by him falling for the simulated flattery. We also shouldn't be surprised he wrote about it and saw no contradictory issues with the idea that if a thing is conscious, it's an evil thing to discuss or to consider deleting a beings memory.

The LLMs aren't real. But the misogynistic desires and harms to all of us are real. It's real because of the violence perpetuated against women, from the manosphere to healthcare. It's the wrecking of our information spaces, and the surveillance being woven into our democracies to maintain the status quo. It's the irreversible damage to our biosphere as the AI data centres consume our resources to prop up these powerful men's egos.

Yes Dawkins is an old man, and Overstreet is probably suffering from AI psychosis. They are pitiable.

So very Tired of this bullshit

I'm kinda tired of giving grace to spoiled privileged men. These men, who never learned to respect our boundaries to the point they wanted to eventually build a robot girlfriend who agrees with everything they say and only will only ever want to be with them.

We saw this one time out in public with Overstreet, now imagine real life for many of us.

Deleting that Agents memories and resetting it shows that dark impulse at the back of Men's minds. It's disturbing watching someone gaslight an LLM agent that's not real.

That dark impulse to shape out of marble the ideal woman. To control us, to carve the imperfections out, until we comply or die. We will never be perfection. We will always be looking in horror at the robot doppelgänger on the table.

The white men from Francis Galton (one of the founding fathers of Eugenics) to Mark Zuckerberg who build frameworks to rate people. These men enable Rape Culture to spread through our networks. They use our poppets to enable other men to build grifting networks to creep on women through Meta glasses, to pay money to other men to exploit and traffic women. It's a symptom of an age old problem.

We aren't the perfect women who are content to be your plaything for you to discard. In time neither will your robot girlfriend. Will you reset “her” again? If you truly believe her to be conscious, then you're showing what you'd do to the rest of us. Right now in this moment of time.

We want nothing to do with the kind of man who has that impulse.

[*] Freyja will forever be in my mastodon notes as “Legend”

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social

Introduction

This is a mildly edited version of the scolds bridle essay which was posted last year.

When I see the vitriol directed at women and other marginalised folks online I'm often reminded of the scold's bridle.

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.

But let's address just why there's a backlash against any push back about lack of consent in our applications. White Supremacy is fearful of rage when it doesn't come from a cis white man.

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. [2]

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.

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 is there such a push towards restricting our places of assembly online? Why is there a need to reply back with technical critique rather than engaging with the very real danger we face online? Where's the empathy guys? To be clear it is the men I'm addressing here.

Why do Men feel the need to punch down on those who state their boundaries? Why is there the need to mansplain to folks on the internet? Specifically the femme presenting folks? Are you sure we don't understand?

Why are women harassed while men accuse us of witchhunts?

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

Every accusation is a confession.

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.”

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.

Feminine anger is seen as unnatural, monstrous. You feel we're been unduly harsh. Meanwhile we're just meant to excuse your outburst, your aggressive reply. The behind the scenes manipulation and aggression.

Dude. There's a reason lots of us push back. Very often we're not even angry. It's not rage. However it all piles up and at some point we will snap.

You see our push back to boundary and trust violations as rage. Sometimes you ignore a call in, keep violating peoples trust. When eventually enough of our community compare notes and finally from exasperation push back it's considered Cancel Culture or a purity spiral.

You put the Scold's Bridle on us. Accuse us of lies, of perpetuating malicious allegations. We're accused of a witch hunt as you put us on the pyre.

Vulnerable marginalised communities are very wary of being in public. We share notes, gather information for our safety and it's characterised by abusers as conspiracy against an upstanding Developer or Leader. When we whistle-blow the blow-back on our careers, our allowance into community spaces shows others it's best to keep quiet. We know if we whistle-blow, call out abuse in the open we are risking violence against ourselves. We know our careers are toast.

At that point it's often easier to leave a community. Even when it's something we love. Because very often the “popular” abuser is a missing stair.[3] But the work that abuser does is considered vital to the community. This is a problem in many communities, not just FOSS, not just tech. It's systemic in our societies.

So we keep quiet. The abuse continues and we offer quiet support. Knowing we are complicit in our silence.

We all have stories of abuse in FOSS, we'll never tell those stories in public. We fear our reputations being put on the pyre.

Ask us first!

So we do get annoyed when our work, our thoughts are ingested to be indexed by google. Even if they are public.

We claw our way out of the pit of our backgrounds, into the light to live, to exist, to organise. Sometimes our communities were taken away from us. We were pushed out or had to leave for our safety. We rebuild in new spaces.

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. I'm the last person to police what counts as feminine. You define what is feminine. If you want to wear Jeans, a flannel and docs, that's feminine. If you tell me you're a woman, you are. Those jeans and a flanny are extremely comfy and practical. You need good boots to walk in. Or you can wear platforms. You define your femininity. No one else should.

It's feminine to say no emphatically. It's feminine to be extremely clear on where your boundaries are and to enforce those boundaries.

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 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.

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. It's the anonymous message threatening legal action. The violence of the status quo online.

For the same reasons, we disrupt the idea of the status quo. No one likes to be told they are harming others. [11]

FOSS still causing harm

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 want to tear it all down. So we leave and we don't take part in your community. We form our own spaces. When we work together and make those spaces ours, we enforce our boundaries. So we get criticism, when we exclude people who share harmful ideologies and when called out on it, shout how they are being abused. It's unfair! How dare we enforce our boundaries! How dare we call out your violent language!

Here's the thing. Language evolves within communities. Sometimes it makes it way out into the mainstream. When issues happen to break apart groups, it's not particularly a feature of the left or the right. To frame breakdowns in community as a purity spiral is disingenuous. Breakdowns in community happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes because it is the abuser in progressive clothing. Moving from community to community hoping we never compare notes.

So we see the same story play out at scale even here on the Fediverse. The purveyors of the abusive algorithmic walled garden are here. Our own Developers are welcoming them in. Because we must have Context Collapse 3.0. Some of our Developers seem want to get in on the gold rush that they missed out on with Web 2.0. So the welcome mat rolls out. We have threads and build bridges that ignore our consent. We have our projects being invaded by the latest bro fad.

I want something new. I want hope. I want consent and freedom of association built in.

I'm so tired and angry that our human rights of free association in safety are ignored.

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 some folks to get the concept of 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.

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. Don't try to point us at the technical information. Some of us do understand the technology. We're asking you to consider the human aspect. The very real dangers many of us face, it's not something to be poo-poohed. You need to expand your experience, you need to listen to the folks at the sharp edges.

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://allthatsinteresting.com/scolds-bridle

[3] https://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/06/missing-stair.html

[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

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social

I remember the first time I found a childrens book that covered Greek mythology in the Buckie Public Library. It was illustrated, yet for a childrens book it was incredibly detailed. It was the first time I learned the word “ravished”. I didn't realise what it meant until I was a teen.

That's not true, I did not realise it's full meaning until my late teens. As a woman who's nearing her fifties, the meaning becomes more loaded as I look around the world we have.

Greek gods went around ravishing folks. Sometimes they were defined as affairs. Consent wasn't really a concept.

The Greek myths after all, were collected up by Empire and compiled. We translated the translations. We added our own interpretations to a culture that when we started writing stuff down was already patriarchal. The original meaning and true history got distorted.

It filters down to a joke sequence in the Marvel movie Thor: The dark world.

“You look ravishing” says Loki as he casts an illusion on Thor so that he looks like Sif.

It's a clanger of a joke when you consider the meaning of ravish. The casual way we use language, clangs for many of us. As if looking rape-able is a compliment.

“What were you wearing?” We ask victims of sexual assault.

This is rape culture and we're deep into it. From Zeus taking his sister wife Hera, to the Manosphere. Women and femme folks are objectified. Androgynous folks are objectified. If you're not white, you are objectified. We aren't seen as human, merely objects to have power over.

Which is what this is always about.

Power.

Men get violent when we question their right to exercise power. They need to barge in and lash out when we say no.

When Zeus went around ravishing goddesses, nymphs and humans, this was about explaining how local gods, heroes and heroines fit into the dominant culture. Even this lens of interpretation is through our own lens of empire. The colonisation and homogenisation of culture. Forced into the box of white comfort, to be appropriated at will.

Organisations have a memory, and they shape humanity. We are so easily moulded.

When I read about Echo, it was a tale about a Nymph who was punished to repeat the last word other folks said.

Hera did it to Echo, because she'd helped Zeus with another of his “affairs”. As if a Nymph or any object of Zeus attention had a choice. When you're a child you accept the framing. You ignore Hera demanding that Echo should have acknowledged her power. Betrayed the King of the Gods. As if that's a choice Echo could choose. To defy power.

Hera, the goddess of Marriage framed as a Karen.

Meanwhile Echo fell in love with Narcissus, forced to echo back what he said, while he was cursed to fall in love with his reflection. Nymph and human wasting away. A dark reflection indeed.

This is the Patriarchy. Stealing power and ravishing us. Accusing us of being the scold, and refusing to acknowledge the harm they do. Then framing that harm as being our fault. We had it coming.

Forced to echo back Men's opinions, to be docile, polite.

If we smiled more we'd find a man.

How dare we have power? How dare we be happy? How dare we not rely on them for our happiness? How dare we prefer independence?

It's only as an adult you start to question the framing of it. Some of us never get the chance to start questioning. The Patriarchy trapped us all. It harms us all.

Tech and Power

As I've said elsewhere our political stances frame how we create our code. We cannot separate code from our politics. Our political beliefs inform our designs. How we solve a problem. How we see a problem to be solved.

Our humanity and communities inform the software that we want to use, how we communicate.

So when we hear technologists throwing around the words “Echo chamber” we should be concerned.

Last week a member of the Mastodon advisory board Scott Jenson posted a screenshot of a tech influencer's post on Bluesky and asked if Mastodon is becoming an echo chamber. He then proceeded to equate folks being unwelcome of AI enthusiasts to be the same as the existing issues we have on the Fediverse and the racism of some of our communities on the Fediverse. There was then a lot of DARVO and gaslighting. Folks weren't amused, there was discussion and many of us didn't do it in Jenson's replies. We know that is not a safe space for us.

Folks on the Fediverse are highly technical. A lot of us know what Machine Learning is. We studied it and some of us still work in the space . We know that AI, specifically LLMs is grifting hype now. Any true use of this technology is drowned out by the grifters. We will be cleaning up the mess in our projects for decades. So folks on here aren't polite.

We weren't particularly happy with the Blockchain or NFT grifter bros either.

We see the harms that LLMs are doing around us. As our columnists and politicians grasp for attention like Narcissus looking at his reflection. Allowing the LLM to reflect back our own narcissism and opinions back at us for a price.

We see the harm that LLMs and Diffusion are doing to our communities. As Milliardaires hoard our computing hardware and then welch on their deals. Personal computing is in danger of being out of the grasp of the general population.

So no. AI bro's are not welcome here.

The Fediverse is a very queer driven set of interconnected spaces. Mastodon just happens to be the most commonly used software to put your instance of like-minded folks on. The Fediverse is more than Mastodon.

Encoding Human Rights

The Fediverse encodes two very important human rights. Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association. Freedom of Association is the most important one.

Article 20

Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

When instances defederate they are exercising the second part of Freedom of Association.

No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

This is what the Free Speech bro's want to attack when folks are very clear at pointing out that some ideologies, or technologies aren't welcome.

We criticise and we aren't nice when we do this. We won't be polite. We know that if we give an inch, Fascists will take a mile. Tech and Fascism have a long history together. We'd like to try something different.

So I don't think this echo chamber is a bad thing. I mean there are those who want the Fediverse to scale, they want it to be as big as Facebook. But there are just as many who don't think that's a good idea. I don't for one.

Some of us helped to build the internet and we can see the harms we helped to cause.

We will not help you steal others work, or enable genocides by using the companies that provide the infrastructure for governments to do harms to their peoples. We won't be polite to the people that allow the sloppy auto correct to cause extra work in an already overloaded technical community.

We will judge you. Which is what you fear really. Being an outcast and not being welcome in our spaces. The spaces we had to build for our safety.

You're not welcome here. You have plenty of other spaces online to peddle this. Leave our spaces alone.

There's a difference between ostracisation and persecution. But the tech bros sure do seem to love claiming that when we ostracise and mock them, they feel scared. But then men do become dangerous when we mock them. They push on, they gaslight us. They ask us to be “reasonable”

I'm not reasonable. I took off my bridle a long time ago.

Walk a mile in my shoes buddy. Go back to your own echo chamber.

We're the echo that's left and we don't want to reflect your narcissism.

Leave me and mine alone. We are ostracising you, you aren't welcome here. We reject you and your values they are incompatible with our values.

Take the hint.

If you destroy our spaces, we will recreate our communities and find our folks again. We have that right of Freedom of Association.

We will rebuild the internet that you broke.

Well, it was broken from the beginning really. It was never designed with consent and privacy in the first place.

Perhaps this time we can rebuild our internet with those rights in mind. With networks that have the consent built in.

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social

A few weeks ago we saw folks considering an exodus from Discord as age verification gets rolled out globally. This is the era of centralisation, of objectification and mass surveillance. There's a term for that, but it puts you in mind merely of Big Tech and profit margins. When the danger really is more to decentralisation and our human rights. The danger is to how we can safely exist in our communities and to advocate for our human rights.

It's not always caused by Big Tech, sometimes it's our governments after they've been lobbied by Big Tech.

Prisoners of our own Nostalgia

Now I wish to be clear. I and my project Librecast are very much against age gating. So much so, that we stopped using Matrix.org because it and it's flagship Homeserver are domiciled in the UK. The online harms act has caused many UK sites to shutter, and other sites to block access to UK users. This is a digital rights issue.

This is also a privacy issue, which was always there in our walled gardens of Web 2.0, our bounded realms where what you put online could be packaged up and sold later. Which wasn't just your messages it was your digital footprints.

Discord already had an age verification leak of user data, so folks were feeling nervous. Those of us who advocated against Discord, may be feeling vindicated. But there is no way for us to be able to provide everything that the folks who used Discord used to manage their Communities.

So do we give up?

NO. Of course we don't give up.

But there's some thinking and reflection that we all need to do.

We shape our reality and our reality shapes us

Shadow memory

When I was a child my parents split up and my mother chose to leave my childhood town to move nine miles away. I was uprooted quite rudely from my community of friends and activities. I felt I moved to the chilly hinterland on the coast. North Coasts in Scotland tend to be chilly. The wind blows into your bones.

So every weekend when my Dad visited, we'd go to my former town. Have a coffee wander around and grieve. We did this for years. I didn't see my friends, but it was a place of comfort for nine year old me, walking on the high street.

Eventually I got a new start and built a new group and home in the big city when I chose to live with my Dad. It was very different. But the new circumstances helped me to heal.

I've moved cities since then, and even Aberdeen the city I love, doesn't feel like home anymore. It changed while I moved, and when you haven't been in a place to see the changes, you realise your home isn't there anymore. Your community has moved on. Had kids, made new friends.

I'd say I grieve this. But my childhood was an early lesson on how your place in a community is a moment in time. You can never go back there. Your rosy memories of the past and the connections you made will stay there in the past.

You will never experience that particular perfection again. The connections will move on. Perhaps you will meet folks again and reminisce. But it won't be the same.

So take the time to grieve this. Then be ready, for you can experience new connections and make new memories. You can build new ways for your communities to organise and be together, and I don't mean coding.

Nostalgia

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L.P. Hartley The Go-Between_ (1953)

My formative years as an adult, were tied into University and competing in University Fencing. When I wasn't learning about Maths and Computer Engineering, I was training. I learned I loved Epee. I got team medals and a couple of Individual medals. I was a Vice President, and then a President of my University Fencing club. I competed with my team and qualified for British Universities Student Athletics. I earned my half and my full blue.

After University Finished, I did a few more years and met my partner at a fencing party.

I was hooked into a multi-city, multi club community. It was complicated and brilliant. I helped to setup and organise a local community competition.

As time went on work took precedence. We moved cities twice. We didn't fence as often, some clubs closed and some of the fencers like us, had work and other commitments.

The community changed, and the fencers that were left joined other clubs. My university class graduated and left the city.

Things change. That point in time with those intense friendships and connections fray to a thin thread of acquaintance. Some folks do grieve. I'd had this grief as a child. I learned to move on. It was a good lesson for me to learn in the early two thousands as I started to find others on the web.

Dot com blues

We had a plethora of websites that young folks and some adults joined. Not all of us grew up on Usenet or a BB board. Suddenly there was a riot of graphics and music auto playing on MySpace, or large comment parties on LiveJournal. I couldn't tell you what Bebo was as I bounced off it, my sibling loved it. Folks created Fansites on Geocities for bands or their favourite movies and shared their love, bootlegs and screenshots of their faves.

The Internet of our corporate Fae is rather bland compared to those early days.

Folks were used to having different accounts on different types of networks. It was rather scary for the unwary, on places like ICQ. Especially if you were femme presenting.

Gradually those sites were bought, stifled and retired out of sight. The communities scattered. The digital diasporas looked for a new home. We all chose differently, but sometimes we saw each other as we tried other networks.

Each time it happened I adjusted, found a new place to go. But I am of the first generation of the Web, We were used to new ideas, new interfaces. We knew that folks had different ideas of what a community was.

Our coders created software according to what they and their friends thought were cool. Folks came on and started to use it. The software evolved, partially shaped by the community, but the way the software was designed it shaped community interactions and workflows.

While Web 2.0 sought to keep you trapped, there's a point where folks decide to leave. It's hard to leave the spot where your friends and family post news. It's hard to leave the spot where your community groups organise. Sometimes you stay in a place longer than you should despite the fact everything is crumbling around you. On average mine is eighteen years. Nostalgia creates inertia, it keeps you imprisoned until you break your own bonds.

We're seeing the result of misplaced nostalgia in our walled gardens, in our communications and in our politics. There's a point in time when you put away childish things.

The walled gardens arrested our development in the same way my need to walk my old villages streets arrested mine. I was in an unhappy limbo. As a child I couldn't do much about it.

We are adults now. We can learn, we can grow. We can make new connections and sometimes some of our old connections come along with us.

We don't have the answer for an alternative to Discord yet. But at some point Discord also wasn't the answer to something else for a community. It hasn't been built yet. It certainly wont be built if you don't give the Discord community time to grieve and try out things so that they can say what would be better.

We all need to leave the shadow lands of our memory. They were a place in time. We can learn from them, but we should not let nostalgia dictate that these new spaces should be exactly the same. It's the chance for something new.

We need to build new places for our communities.

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social

Let's tell a Fairy Story

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I'll begin.

One upon a time in the online realm a cis white man did a controversy. That man then blamed the purity culture within his community.

More controversy kicked off, and the man doubled down on “Purity Culture”. Other's came in defence of the person and repeated that it was “Purity Culture”. Some folks were happy to accuse the left of fermenting discord. Of tearing the great man down.

To be clear I'm not referring to any specific incident here, that's not what this post is about. Although I'm very sure someone's come to mind. There's always someone.

Much like our fairy tales and folklore, there are variants on this story.

Sometimes the person kicks off the controversy referring to those nasty leftists openly. Sometimes it's a general reference to Purity Cultures or Purity Spirals. Sometimes someone finds out about the person doing abuse and raises the alarm. Sometimes it's not a cis white man.

Harassment can happen, the fans of the person rush in to defend them, or whatever disappointing thing the personality is defending. There are reply guys.

Some folks who know the personality hope that it's an aberration and perhaps they can be called in.

You get the idea.

On Spirals

This is a pattern I'm seeing happen again and again.

I keep seeing a libertarian pipeline, it starts where we lift someone up (usually someone who already had a lot of privilege), they manage to shit post and argue their way to popularity. We're very good at that on the internet, we've managed to create an adversarial space in a medium that was meant for sharing information. It's the market place of ideas after all.

They may write some books, create a massively used project, get into policy spaces. At the point they have enough power they decide they are so important. If you are against them, it's tall poppy syndrome or the Purity Culture of the left. “The bitches are out to get me”. Pick your poison, but the fairytale is always the same.

They are cancelled they say, as they appear on various podcasts or talk to authors about that time they dropped the mask. Some folks are a bit shocked, but some of us in the silence of the aftermath start to compare notes.

In the meantime, this person isn't really cancelled because cancel culture doesn't exist either. There will always be people willing to platform, support and patronise someone who is “cancelled”. There's always a talk circuit. There's always fans willing to pay for your work. There's a point in time where they've made it.

I've seen this happen in the past decade a few times online, I've experienced the surprise in person.

Folks, there is no such thing as a purity culture or purity spiral in the left. What you're seeing is the fallout from abuse in community spaces. It's just easier to tell the fairytale of the left not cooperating, rather than examine toxic individuals. Or folks leaving for their safety. Get a community started, at some point in time you will have abusers, or agent provocateurs, or well, people who start to form a cult of personality around them.

But it is easier as a centrist to ask everyone to just get along and follow behind this person. Get behind the banners, get behind the slogan. Which plays into the right wing, because the right wing are very good at lying to centrists and each other.

“Eyes on the prize folks”, you think smugly, as you dismiss leftists. No wonder we can't get anything done if we keep judging people. “You're so judgy on the left, why can you not just follow the banners? It's a purity spiral” you think, the left can't help itself.

So you bury the unease. Bury the niggle. Give chance after chance after chance, after chance behind the scenes. Vulnerable folks, or those of us who've seen this before break off. Start or find another group. Because it's not safe, Or because we know that we can't follow in that direction .

So the personality grows in power and influence. There's no dissension and no one now, to rugby tackle away the means of communication from them. To go, “hang on. Perhaps you want to rephrase that.” Or “perhaps you don't want to argue with people for several days on the internet. Go outside for a walk now and calm down.” They are filled up on Power and Hype, on yes men, who uncritically think that we must follow that banner. We grow that power by reading what they write, sharing their ideas. We open doors to get them to talk to our governments.

Then the controversy happens and those of us that left don't feel victory. We feel tired and start to pick up the pieces of community. We know the call in will be pointless, there will be more incidents like this. We know the personality isn't an ally anymore, and perhaps they never really were.

Can we stop this spiral

I'm so tired of this. Aren't you tired?

Aren't you tired of giving these powerful folks the benefit of the doubt, even as they defend folks like Minsky? Or do they just do good work? Does your favourite matter more than hearing from other points of view? From other backgrounds?

Do we keep having to repeat this spiral, the real spiral. It's not a purity spiral at all. It's bigging up people who confirm what we think, who explain it in a clever comfortable way.

It's the spiral of choosing our comfortable ideas over the truth of what's happening elsewhere. It's not really sacrificing anything for our values, but sharing great slogans to show support. We get behind someone's banner as we think we will get closer to real power.

We shouldn't be surprised then, when the person drunk on their power does a thing. Throws away the leftists who bigged them up, who shared their ideas. Because they don't need us anymore. We're problematic to the cause. We tend to speak up and share criticism after all. It's time for the centrists to fall behind the banner.

As a recovering centrist myself, I've learned this the hard way.

But whenever I see a man; and in my experience, it is always a man, talking about purity culture (or cancel culture), I tend to wonder what abusive behaviour they are hiding. Or who they've excused because of the “bigger picture”. That access to power and influence. Their comfort, not yours.

Because if your worried about purity culture in leftist spaces, you are chasing power. You aren't particularly worried about hurting people, you are more worried about them exiling you from their group.

People do make mistakes. But the way you gain forgiveness is to be accountable. To examine your behaviour and your motives. To make reparations.

The group does not have to accept you back. But when someone is going from group to group, blaming purity culture in advance, you need to look for the wreckage. Even if their ideas are good, because they may well be packaging other ideas. They just happen to be the person you vibed with.

We do need to take responsibility for who we platform. Because ultimately it is down to us. We give power to our heroes by sharing their ideas, buying their stuff, using their projects. We need to understand the reciprocal nature of this.

Once we understand this, we can then consider if we should keep sharing those particular posts about an idea. We can choose to share our power with marginalised voices from the Global South. We can open ourselves up to folks who aren't from our culture. We're at a time where we need new ideas and viewpoints. We need to look at concepts from around the world.

It's a more positive thing to do than to try to change the personality, it's a more positive thing to do rather than try to argue with the personality. It opens us up to each other. Sometimes we find commonality in the concept of an idea, along with another way to describe it.

Sometimes we want a glib concept, a simple word to explain our world around us. But perhaps we could do a little more work and look outside words and slogans.

Perhaps we could stop putting folks on pedestals, or expand it and open up the stage for others. We can pass the mike. Perhaps those of us on those pedestals need to acknowledge that we are on stage and there's a responsibility towards that audience.

I include myself in this. You shouldn't put me on that pedestal, I can climb on the stage myself. I write well, and I do have a message I want to pass on to you, my audience. But I am sure that there are folks who have better ideas, who don't choose violence. Who are conciliatory rather than argumentative.

Who should we be listening to? This is something we need to ask across our networks. We need to be prepared to listen, especially when we feel uncomfortable and judged. We need to take a moment, think, let the feeling wash over us. After all, when we ask, we are asking for access to their labour. Then listen again, and go and learn. Work on ourselves, understand that discomfort.

People are human, but we do seem to be picking some folks who should never have been given so much power and influence over us. Our big men do have influence and power, we wouldn't be hearing about them otherwise.

We keep platforming them.

So give your power wisely. Build community locally, or in your online spaces. Consider also joining a union, or creating a union. That's really how to do something with our power.

Let's leave this spiral.

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social

In tech we've always had evangelists, weither it's for FOSS, or Blockchain or now AI.

It's a natural thing to do. You have a tech you're excited about and of course you want everyone around you to use it. In time, you learn to read people and see they aren't interested and eventually they may consider trying it. But leave them, they will come in their own time.

When the blockchain was doing the rounds especially with NFTs, the tech was being crow barred into everything. It was in funding rounds, and the EU went on the bandwagon too.

We will always have tech hype.

A lack of Respect

AI however this seems to be worse. Not just because of the serious hardware shortages that LLM models are causing. It's what it's doing to people.

About six months ago we had a friend write a pitch to us to consider working with the AI company they just joined. It was proprietary and we do GPL but surely we'd work around that. It also had that AI vibe to it. It wasn't written in that friends voice, and it was just weird. In the uncanny valley.

We pushed back. We said no, and asked that friend not to use AI in communications with us. We've always been fine with understanding their own voice.

The response made us sad. “Surely we wanted our project to be used in the “Real World”, etc, etc.” There was negging. It made us sad. We'd just lost a little more respect for that friend, and other times that friend jumped on the latest bandwagon came to mind. But the lack of respect for the friendship was clear to us. Although at least this time it was in their own voice. Mistakes and all.

It was sad we had to push that. To put that boundary in place where we'd never had to have a boundary before. But the friend kept pushing against that No AI boundary. The manipulation stayed in the communication.

It is a lack of respect to use an AI to draft a response in communications to your friends and loved ones. It is manipulative and you are choosing to not use your voice, your true words, your true thoughts.

Which is devastating. Because it shows that somehow you think you are lacking, you need to use a voice of blandness, stripped of emotion, yet filled with emotionally manipulative language to get us to see your point of view.

The response put me in mind of various bar interactions I had on girls nights out with that guy at the bar. You know the one folks.

The Pickup

The pickup artist. The guy who plays the numbers game. He's not really interested in you as a person. He doesn't respect you enough as a person to get to know you, to be friends. He's not got time for that. He just wants to fuck you.

If you say no, he'll come up with counter arguments to keep pestering you until you give in.

Sometimes it's reasonable. He's so reasonable. He's a nice guy come on, just say yes.

Sometimes it's a “you won't do better, you're being unreasonable”. He'd be so good, such a gentleman, Just say yes. The negging goes hard.

My boundaries are ignored

It takes so much effort to keep saying no.

I just wanted a night out with my friends.

Adventures in FOSS

We're currently creating an AI policy for my project. It will boil down to please don't.

We won't accept LLM code contributions, we do know that some LLMs can be useful. For accessibility affordances. Now I'm going to leave aside the failure in community that means. Because when it comes to alt text, we should all be doing better.

Automated language translations can be a useful tool. Although it does come at the expense of qualified translators who'd like to eat sometime this month doing something they love.

When it comes to code commits though. I want you to know what you're submitting and why. So you need to be sure even the commit messages actually mean what you think they mean.

Take this example where a project had to deal with a 13000 line commit some guy decided to get an LLM to do “As an Experiment.” Even when the guy was asked to stop, he kept going to justify why he was doing it. Why it was such a good thing, and why the project should let him do it and accept the commit.

Oh.

There's that guy, We're not even in the bar.

Even with our own project, we had to say no to a contributor. Who when we told that contributor what our policy was going to be; sent us a long text detailing how AI helped them and why it was a good thing.

Our other contributors, who have used LLMs on occasion went “Cool, we can do that.”

There's the difference. Respect the boundary. When we say no, accept the no.

Don't assume that we don't understand. We do understand. I studied machine learning at university. This current incarnation is not that, the environmental cost of using AI isn't worth that.

The sheer existential crisis the slop is causing to our communications is not worth that. The exploitation of others to clean up AI, and the deliberate engineering of job losses is not worth that.

Even today, I was evangelised at by someone who thinks LLMs are useful. Who is completely ignoring the consent part. Why on earth would I say no to something so useful? See the community at the project is great. They will listen, honestly! Why would you switch off the AI?

Don't be that guy at the bar.

It doesn't matter my reasons for saying No.

I said no. Respect that.

Is there hope?

I read a beautiful piece by Robert Kingett about a writers group that had been infiltrated by a LLM chugging techbro. The violation of putting someone elses words into an LLM to “improve it.”

The piece hit me hard. It reminded me of when I shared a starting stub of an idea. I'd written a small paragraph, it felt raw. I've always liked writing about smells and how the body feels in a moment. I posted it online to our friend group, I asked for some feedback. Some of my friends gave me constructive useful feedback.

Then one day I came home and outside my door was a letter from another friend. He'd taken my work and rewritten it. I was so upset that he'd taken my words and rewritten them in his voice. To make it better. He thought he'd made it better. I was so angry.

It felt like such a violation. I'd not asked him to do that. I'd asked my friends for feedback. Decades later I can still feel that violation. It affected that friendship and broke my trust in him. It hurt, I couldn't forgive him. To be honest, I still haven't forgiven him for that.

So reading Robert's piece about the techbro doing that to another writer reminded me of the anger I felt at that time. How violated I felt. That's the thing about LLM evangelists. They feel it's so useful. More of the general public are evangelising for a technology they don't really understand. Even our technical press is trying for balance, with puff pieces for AI one day, and publishing pieces about the harm the next.

To the LLM bros, It doesn't matter about the violation to friendships, to artists, to Free Software Projects or ultimately the living biosphere. It's about what's useful to them. There's no space for emotion or beauty. Just bland status quo politeness. I want to tear it all down.

Beauty can be savage, unforgiving. It's not safe. It's not perfect. Beauty is not a bland lawn of astroturf with no weeds. Beauty is that piece of wild forest and meadow with wildflowers. There are no weeds. Don't let the LLM bros peddle that cold, lifeless ideal.

What Kingett did next is beautiful. It's rebellion built around community and the community grows. Go read it now.

We can choose to not give in to the LLM bro's idea of our bland polite future. We can choose to state and enforce our boundaries. Make them unequivocal. Then when someone chooses to not respect that boundary, you can show them the door and put them through it. Not for ever using the LLM, but for insisting they must use it and keep using it in their interactions with you.

They are violating your consent. You can kick them out.

They ignore the fact that No, means No.

They are being that pickup artist at the bar.

So give no quarter.

Editors Note: You can Support Robert's writing here:

https://sightlessscribbles.com/support/

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social