Post #1777606

2026-03-27 13:05 UTC

@chandlerc Hmmm. I don't hear you as factoring in the human experience of being in community and being ostracized from it. I think that fear, and the pain of it happening, goes fairly deep. I'm not sure if factoring it in would change your reasoning much, but I wouldn't leave it out of your thinking. At a minimum, I think people will still react very strongly negatively to the threat of ostracization, possibly even more so than the thread of criminal prosecution. Having said that, I totally see the reluctance to ostracize as being weaponized by bad actors. And I have appreciated the culture on Bluesky of "Don't engage, just block", which is basically ostracization, if of a much smaller kind than blocking someone from an open source community.

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@chandlerc@hachyderm.io 2026-03-27 19:30

@curiouserrandy I feel like I tried to directly address that fear: """ That's not to say that either of these is an inconsequential event -- they can be very consequential. And so folks I think feel motivated to push them to the higher standard. """ And in _this_ post, I'm not trying to address this fear being weaponized (agree it is, and that's a big problem, just not for this post). All I'm trying to highlight that the standard we reach for to address this fear shouldn't be the _same_ standard that we use for state-backed "ostracization" of incarceration and physical violence. The standard that is used there is probably not well optimized for addressing the real, but categorically lower, risks of ostracization from an OSS community or collection of work colleagues. And when we *do* reach for that higher standard, it gives IMO a very damaging impression of conflating these two risks as of a similar magnitude. But banning you from an online space is very different from physical assault, hand cuffing, and incarceration. =/

Open ##1777607