Hyprland Banned from FreeDesktop: Why.
Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of: angry rants that will make me no friends whatsoever. Today we'll talk about the Hyprland's project and how the developer's account has been removed from the FreeDesktop gitlab instance and related IRC channels. The reason behind it is quite complex, and it requires going back a couple of years to have full context over this story.
But wait, you might say, what's the Hyprland's project? And, sure, I could tell you all about how it's a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor based on wlroots that has an explicit goal of having a neat design, but - firstly - I don't know anything about Wayland compositors and - secondly - it actually doesn't matter at all for this story, because the reason for the ban has to do more with the behavior of the lead developer, Vaxry, than anything else. So, let's take a step back.
On September of 2022, an user on Hyprland Discord changed their username to include their pronouns; this was done to have the same username as on Matrix, since Matrix did not have an "about" section for that.
They were quickly made fun of by some random user, got told that they shouldn't care about it and misgendered by a moderator within minutes; then, their username was changed (by a moderator) to replace they/them with who/cares (and the user couldn't change it back either); the whole thing was as unprofessional as could be. Generally speaking, back then the Discord community had very light moderation and allowed even hateful content.
One year later, September 2023, a user suggested to add a code of conduct to the project. The initial reaction from the Vaxry, the main developer, was… meh:
First of all, why would I pledge to uphold any values? Seems like just inconveniencing myself. I am not able to enforce that CoC, neither do I want to. I just write code. If I'd want to moderate, I'd spend 90% of the time reading kids arguing about bullshit instead of coding.
Generally speaking, we can see Vaxry very much not taking this suggestion seriously at all, even calling a mastodon post talking about the pronoun thing feces of a post. Eventually, Vaxry closed the issue as "offtopic".
As a result of all of this, developer Drew DeVault decided to privately contact Vaxry to talk about the above. Thus, Vaxry decided to run a poll on the Discord server, asking whether users felt they have experienced harassment in the community, and 40% answered they did.
Let me repeat that. 40% of the people who voted in the poll claimed they had been harassed within the Hyprland community. That's… something. Because of that, Vaxry has since then implemented new changes in moderation of the Discord channel, and it seems like the situation is better now. he says it's "way less of a toxic hell hole". I have checked the discussion multiple times over the past few months, and I can confirm it's okay, with multiple queer folks being able to be part of the community without issue. I still wouldn't recommend to join it though, especially because (a) it's still quite toxic, here's somebody saying that developer Lyude is "brain damaged",
and (b) this new change in moderation included a complete ban over the discussion of politics, and the inclusion of any lgbt or trans topic in that politics label; this means th;at if you start talking about lgbt, you might get banned for it. However, this rule is sparingly enforced, with many people being able to discuss it (even in a positive manner, which is great) without any moderation.
On top of that, Vaxry joined the podcast Tech Over Tea by Brodie Robertson. This is how he addressed the pronoun incident from a year erlier:
[A trans person] joined the Discord server and made a big deal out of theirpronouns [..] because they put their pronouns in their nickname and made a bigdeal out of them because people were referring to them as “he”, which, on the Internet, let’s be real, is the default. And so, one of the moderators changed the pronouns in their nickname to “who/cares”. […] That was very unprofessional but let’s be real, this isn’t like, calling someone the N-word or something.
Now, this is the worst apology you can say. First of all, they "didn't make a big deal out of their pronouns", they just … added them to their username, and just that was enough to be made fun of. Secondly, yes, being misgendered is a big deal and no, calling people "he" is not "the default on the internet", whatever that means. And, finally, and this is the most important part, saying "yeah, it was unprofessional, but it's not like I sad the N-word or something" is … not an apology? It's right there with "I'm sorry if you got offended".
Overall, I think it's clear Vaxry doesn't really understand some key points about the trans community. He said it himself; he used to use a derogatory term for them, and more recently he said that he just didn't know that you weren't supposed to use that word because he doesn't keep up with the lgbt community or something. He also said - again, in 2022 - that "we all shit on the lgbt community here" along with other very dumb stuff. Again, he says that he has changed since then, and so has the moderation of the Discord channel.
His opinions haven't changed that much, though. He more recently published a blogpost minimizing this whole idea of harassment through messages:
I definitely am not a fan of how seemingly weak people online, especially teenagers, have become. Words are just words. Someone calling another person a "retard" shouldn't really be a big deal.
Ultimately, without a strong mentality, you will most likely not be very successful in life.
All of the above really started to become a common talk point around September of last year, when Drew DeVault published an article with the findings I mentioned. During the last few months, the story, and Vaxry's very weak apologies, have started circulating more and more. This brings us to the more recent events.
The Code of Conduct group of the FreeDesktop foundation most likely heard about all of the above and, after discussion, decided to send an email to Vaxry. The developer that was representing the group was Lyude Paul, though she made it clear that the email was from the entire group. They warned Vaxry that the past behavior goes against the code of conduct of the FreeDesktop project and that, if it were to continue, they would have to revoke Vaxry's access to the FreeDesktop infrastructure. She does say, however, that the recent moderation changes seem to have improved the situation.
The whole email very kind, in-depth and explains really well why it's important not to see that sort of behavior in the community, in the future.
Now, it's worth having a discussion about this "Code of Conduct" thing. The Code of Conduct of FreeDesktop can not dictate how people should behave in the Hyprland community, which has its own rules. FreeDesktop is not trying to regulate that, or to be an internet police. The email is very clear on this.
However, they are very much free to choose who to work with; if your actions have been violating their code of conducts, even if in the Hyprland community, they can choose to not collaborate with you. You will still be able to join the Hyprland community, which has its own rules.
The thing is, your actions define you, regardless of where you are. If you act in a rude and disrespectful manner, enabling or partecipating transphobic behavior, that's going to define you -- even in communities outside those where you took those actions. This is especially true if you're the leader of a pretty big project, thus having a lot of attention on you and extra responsabilities. It's fair for FreeDesktop to say, hey, if that behavior continues, then we don't really want to collaborate with you anymore, because we do not want to associate to such behaviors.
This applies to … pretty much any community of product. If I were to say something extremely offensive and tranphobic and discriminatory on my channel, thus publicly in front of thousant of people, that's going to define who I am. And I might lose my job to that, because maybe my job doesn't want to have employees like that. I might get throw out of KDE, because there's a code of conduct there too. I might even get removed from youtube, which has its own terms of services. I would still be able to say offensive and transphobic stuff on my own self-hosted space, my free speech isn't put at risk, but other projects and communities might not want to have anything to do with me. Welcome to episode one of how the world works.
Of course, Vaxry paints this in a completely different way. He talks about RedHat wanting to be "the internet police" and "applying the code of conduct outside their project" and that they are "threating him". (By the way, this has nothing to do with RedHat, except that Lyude used a RedHat.com email address). He closes off this section with:
I respect everyone's right to freedom and to moderate their community however they want. What I don't respect is people going outside of their communities and trying to enforce their own moderation rules onto others, especially when it's based on outdated information and hearsay, like we're seeing in this e-mail.
And, again, that's not what they're doing. It's actually well explained in the first email: you are the leader of a somewhat known project, you indulged in offensive behavior in the past, they're telling you that if you keep on doing that, then they don't want to collaborate with you anymore. You can still do that, you just loose access to FreeDesktop infrastructure. Because they don't want to work with you.
On top of that, I would like to remind everybody that, as much as Vaxry constantly tries to downplay the past issues and incidents, saying "outdated information and hearsay", we've seen multiple examples of discriminatory or insulting behavior in his community or from himself, and it's very much not hearsay as he has admitted the whole pronoun incident too before - yet again - downplaying it. And, sure, Lyude is at least months late compared to when the Drew DeVault article was out, which is when the change in moderation happened. But she even pointed this out by saying that the situation had improved, she just said: this happened in the past (and it did), please don't make it happen again.
I particularly love how a random HackerNews user under the name of akerl_ put it:
Seems pretty straightforward to me. The Freedesktop project isn't acting as "internet police". They're exercising control over their own community membership, and taking the behavior of participants in and outside their community as representative of whether they want to permit that participant.The banhammer is wielded by people who seemingly only wield it to silence people whom they disagree with.
If this is what it looks like to be silenced, it seems pretty loud.
After the original post, Lyude sent another email to inform that the language in that post was unacceptable and that Vaxry's account would be suspended from FreeDesktop infrastructure, which has happened.
She seems to be somewhat worried about receiving harassment as a result of publishing her emails and attributing it specifically to her, rather than the code of conduct team of FreeDesktop. Which is not completely unreasonable, if you recall that just today somebody has said that she's "brain damaged" on Vaxry's Discord without any repercussion so far.
Oh and, on top of that, she was misgender on Hyprland's discord - yet again - with no consenquences.
Finally, the emails from Vaxry include some of the dumbest talking points of the right-wing community, even if Vaxry himself is not a right-wing person. Such as:
As per Your own values, or at least the ones You preach, "diversity and inclusivity", so people with different beliefs should not be marginalized. Although, according to the leaked internal documents, it seems that only includes non-white, non-right-wing, non-religious people. Everyone else is not invited
This refers to the leaked documents by Lunduke and, hey, I've done a one hour long video about how Lunduke's content is very often misleading, straight up incorrect, and about how he's a far-right-wing person who holds conspiratory beliefs (such as vaccines are a hoax and climate change isn't happening). The specific "leak" in question is about an optional diversity training happening in RedHat about priviledge. Woo. It's very common, and very clueless, to say that by excluding those who discriminate against marginalized groups, you're actually not being inclusive towards poor white, right-wing, religious people. (Also, again, RedHat has nothing to do with this).
To make sure this whole thing makes sense, let me conclude by saying that Hyprland is a good, maybe even great, project lead by a clearly skilled developer. However, having great development skills does not mean that you're also knowledgeable about political issues and how to approach them, how to handle communities and respond to criticism, how to respectfully deal with others and so on. Personally, I think that Vaxry is currently learning about all of those, and there's clear improvement signs, such as the better moderation and learning more about trans issues and so on. At the same time, I kind-of understand that FreeDesktop might not want to be associated with him at the current time. I hope that can change in the future, and that Vaxry can get back to being able to use the FreeDesktop infrastructure.
