Two years ago, there was a previous attempt by a couple of folks (I was one of them) to address lingering community safety issues in the #NixOS community. This came in the form of RFC 98: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/98

The idea was that the NixOS community hadn't grown that big yet, so there was still a fair amount of room for setting up healthy governance structures.

RFC 98 proposed a participatory moderation model, with a rotating cast of moderators, and a moderation process that was based in consensus seeking and helping people understand the implications of what they say and do, preferring to resolve conflicts through mediation rather than punishment.

A number of privileged white dudes caused a huge fuss over this proposal. Why? Because it didn't specify *exactly* which things were and were not allowed (as this was meant to be a consensus-seeking thing); and they were convinced that it would be used to silence and/or censor people, even though the proposal explicitly stated otherwise.

(Cynically, I would say that they were afraid that there would be consequences for them overstepping their behaviour; something they could previously do with relative impunity, and free of the "risk of getting criticized".)

A competing proposal was put forth by someone else as a result, RFC 114, which introduced a 'traditional' code of conduct with specific disallowed things and no real provisions for problematic behaviour outside of those.

Crucially, whereas RFC 98 sought to *change* the shape of the community, to improve community safety... RFC 114 was meant to enshrine the *current* state of the community, not being particularly offensive to anyone currently involved in the project, and not excluding any of the existing behaviours.

RFC 98 was concern-trolled to death. The authors (very much marginalized folks) burned out. It was never passed, and neither was RFC 114. No formal support from project governance ever materialized.

And now an immigrant murder machine manufacturer has sponsored NixCon (sponsorship since thrown out, after public criticism), and this is being enthusiastically defended by people on the NixOS forums, who seem entirely comfortable in their defense.

Does this mean that the NixOS community is full of fascists? No. And there is a pretty large contingent of marginalized folks within the community!

But the reality is that community safety issues are not a new problem in NixOS, that the Anduril sponsorship was really not a free-standing incident, and that on a governance level, almost nothing is being done about it.

[RFC 0098] Community Team by IreneKnapp · Pull Request #98 · NixOS/rfcs

This is a proposal for the direction of the NixOS community, by myself and ashkitten. We've been working on this for a while and are very pleased to be publicly presenting it. We welcome public dis...

^GitHub