THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS
When a white man is in charge of a project and responsible for every final decision, even if he is the best listener and is super accommodating, every decision he makes will be biased towards the experiences of a white man and the privileges that entails.
The pushback he is so hurt by getting from the community of marginalised and vulnerable people when making a decision that benefits him and hurts them is a
fraction of the abuse that people of colour, disabled people, queer people, women, etc. have to deal with on a constant basis. And still every decision is oriented to his experiences, without empathy.
He is trying to make a competitor to Twitter, that he proudly proclaims bans nazis, and he is another white man at the top of a hierarchy, dismissing those whose needs and experiences have been neglected by Twitter, the people he claimed to want to protect.
None of this will change until he shares some of the power over his project with people of colour, women, and other marginalised groups who are vulnerable when they speak up online.
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THE LACK OF APPRECIATION FOR HARD WORK
In the last few weeks, I have made a UI suggestion with a mock-up and one without, and Gargron implemented both, but he didn’t acknowledge me or reply to me or thank me for my contributions at any point. He just did it. When I mentioned this on Mastodon, someone replied and said exactly what I was expecting — that working on open source projects is a thankless job and that’s just how it is, it’s the culture, get used to it. (I did also get a lot of grateful and kind and supportive replies, to be fair.)
When he does that he effectively takes the credit for others’ work. If he doesn’t mention that it was someone else’s, I will assume an idea was his.
For all my work on the issue list and in helping to improve the UI, I will never be acknowledged in release notes. You only get an acknowledgement or gratitude if you can code, no matter what else you do and how you contribute.
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THE POWER PLAY
If we ask for features that help us and our admins to protect us we are told that if we want it that badly we should “fork” — Github issue list speak for “duplicate the entire project, code the features you want, and run it yourself.” Gargron says it, Gargron’s supporters say it. It’s realistic for them, because they have been coding for years. For a lot of them it’s their day job.
It’s a power play, because we wouldn’t be so desperate if we could code it ourselves — they have all the power and we have to beg them to help us. And they
could help us, but they get to decide whether or not we get the features we need.
They are entirely capable of duplicating the project and making the features they want, but if we wanted to do that we would have to pay someone. The financial cost would be significant, and in order to keep the code maintained with new updates from the main project we would have to
keep paying. For most people this is just not sustainable.
There are forks of Mastodon that could be willing to code and add features for us, but those are run by individuals or groups of friends — Bea, the developer of the
glitch.social fork, says that
people who object to Gargron’s management of things and want a more democratic project won’t find what they need with glitch.
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