Post #806760

2026-03-27 06:30 UTC

Been mulling something... (No, this is not actually a sub-toot) Not sure I have it _quite_ articulated well yet, but getting close... Here is my current best attempt... I think one thing that really misses the mark in culture efforts, inclusivity efforts, and things like codes-of-conduct for organizations &amp; companies is trying to replicate the approach taken by government/state structures. For example, using legalistic language to try and establish precision of wording in a CoC. Or structuring moderation rules or response policy as-if rules of law and governments. Or demand &quot;adjudication&quot; of moderation/CoC claims with an innocent unless proven guilty, shadow of a doubt, precise evidentiary rules, etc. Fundamentally, the context here is critically _different_, and trying to apply the approach of one to the other is a mistake. In both directions. Open source communities, even companies, are not sovereign states. They do not employ an armed police force or military to backstop their rules. If the state decides &quot;you may not say that&quot;, they mean, &quot;you may not say that and live as part of this state&quot;. And that determination is backed by the threat of violence. The state and the government _should_ be held to the highest possible standard. Judging someone guilty of a crime and enforcing it through state-backed violence of incarceration had _better_ be innocent until proven guilty, and proven with the highest standard of evidence, oversight, and rigor. Getting banned from an open source community, or even being fired from a hot-shot tech job is _incredibly_ different. That&#39;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. But we also need to be realistic, as these are not state-violence backed judgements. This is not the literal forced removal of your freedom or life. This is at _most_ the loss of an especially lucrative career that must be replaced with a categorically less lucrative career. And that&#39;s the worst case. Most moderation decisions are _hilariously_ less consequential. And it&#39;s entirely reasonable to use a less consequential process to arrive at them.

Replies (4)

@rinon@infosec.exchange 2026-03-27 07:28

@chandlerc Very much agree. Particularly for the open source and community contexts, leadership and moderation should include setting a culture of safety and inclusion. Setting that cultural expectation is so much more important than “official processes.” The risk of allowing bad behavior to persist is that it will become normalized, which is a much worse outcome for a community than losing an individual’s contributions.

Open ##1777603
@modulux@node.isonomia.net 2026-03-27 07:52

@chandlerc First off, I think you're essentially right that the standard should be different. Not only because the consequences are different, but because the capacity to investigate and adjudicate a claim is diffrent too (the state has special organs for this). That said, I'd push back on two aspects. First, the notion that losing employment is trivial or unimportant. There's good research on how harmful this is, and in general, many jurisdictions have tenure of employment as a right, requiring proper grounds for dismissal. I think any dilution of this stance is dangerous, because if you can dismiss someone without sufficient cause in one instance, you can do so for less justifiable reasons. Second, I think it's important to consider that this happens in the context of communities, where people can do irrational and adversarial things. Norms can be instrumentalised by bad actors if there aren't sufficient safeguards. (I could provide examples, not in free software, but regarding similar contexts.)

Open ##1777604
@curiouserrandy@hachyderm.io 2026-03-27 13:05

@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.

Open ##1777606
@mattskala@mstdn.io 2026-03-27 14:18

@chandlerc I think part of the problem is that the free software community is accustomed to thinking in terms of software, and of copyright licenses. Both of those push thinking in the direction of having codified rules, and thinking that such rules are both necessary and sufficient to achieve cultural goals - because that's how software works, and it's how copyright licenses purport to work. The libertarian current of "all law is contract law, and we can write our own" doesn't help either.

Open ##1777611