The dire state of NixOS's moderation culture
rfc-evidence/rfc_evidences_experiences.md at master · nrdxp/rfc-evidence
Part of NixOS RFC 175

Note: The RFC authors were banned almost immediately after posting it. You can, however, discuss it in this public matrix room:
https://matrix.to/#/#rfc-175-all-together:matrix.org

Appendix of Evidences and Experiences
This appendix provides a detailed account of some experiences that highlight the dire state of NixOS's community moderation culture, as perceived from the unique perspective of the two authors of this RFC. It offers concrete reasons, in the very sense of the aforementioned Memorandum, to demonstrate the necessity of adopting such a document. It is important to note, however, that this document is not exhaustive and is limited mostly to the recent past.
Reflecting on events over the last few months, including Srid's ban in November 2023, this RFC must also be viewed in light of very recent and ongoing controversies. During the second Anduril sponsorship controversy in early 2024, it became clear to us that a certain subsection of the community is heavily leaning into what might be termed the myth of marginalization as a strategic device to gain special powers over others.
Simultaneously, this group, still upset about the failure of RFC 98, is using the myth of fascism combined with an abusive extension of the paradox of tolerance (originally formulated by Karl Popper with a very different intent) to portray their opponents as bad-faith actors, or even as outright evil. They themselves, of course, do everything they can to appear justified in exercising power with absolutely no accountability, and with a clear sense of their own privileged entitlement to do so.1
In the most recent twist of events, a group of people has rallied behind an anonymously redacted document and has started to target Eelco Dolstra, the founder of the entire Nix project. Note that Irene Knapp, the main author of the failed RFC 98, is among the signatories of this document:
https://save-nix-together.org/
The current moderation team heavily supports this latest move. As we can clearly see here, contributor Hexa, himself a member of the Nix community moderation team at the time of this writing, is promoting the message to the public by posting it on lobste.rs:
https://lobste.rs/s/0qvtim/open_letter_nixos_foundation mirror
Please note again that Irene Knapp, the main author of the failed RFC 98, is part of the moderation team on lobste.rs at the time of this writing: https://lobste.rs/~Irene
Eelco Dolstra is being depicted as an irresponsible project leader who must be ousted for "the community" to take over the project. But who exactly is "the community," and who speaks for them? In a recent discussion regarding the finding on GitHub, a user addressed what he perceived as "a de-facto power grab" by the moderation team concerning deciding sponsorship policy for Nix-related events:
NixOS/foundation#128 (comment) screen
We are now witnessing a much larger de facto power grab, all out in the open, and again related to moderation. We are deeply concerned by this unabashed attempt to transform the existing open community into an ideological playground for an extremely intolerant far-left identitarian ideology. The moderation team is central to all of this, as it seems to enact and protect their intolerance. This is endangering all moderate and decent people who want to share in the benefits that the Nix ecosystem has to offer.
The authors of the anonymous document are clearly aware of the nature of their own attempt. At the end of a section of their document, shrouded in the language of "empathy," they ask for preemptive censorship of any criticisms:

Finally, we acknowledge that any changes in Eelco’s role, even if prompted by clear misconduct, are going to be interpreted as a bunch of left-wing people taking over the project. Although the authors’ politics are left-leaning, this is not about Eelco’s political views, it is about his actions, how they have shaped the Nix project culturally, and how his actions do not serve the project’s interests. We realize how this interpretation will lead to significant moderation load due to the out-of-community brigading activities of certain banned community members, as well as internal community debate. We would ask the Foundation to make a clear statement that this is unacceptable behavior when they take action.**

Nevermind the hypocrisy of accusing others of brigading while practicing the same tactic for years on end, and to great effect; as any far-leftist identitarian would acknowledge: tech is political, and so is culture. Therefore, to them, this is necessarily all and primarily about politics, and in that sense, all their (rather extreme) actions are justified in their own eyes, and on their own authority. Everybody knows, by now, that an identitarian left-leaning person does not believe in political neutrality! In fact, they have made that clear themselves on a number of occasions. Therefore, The denial of this must be taken to be a strategic diversion. And we can clearly see here, while internal debate is unacceptable because it raises the moderation load, the moderation team member Hexa himself is posting the controversial letter publicly, raising the stakes, creating more incentive for such divisive debate. A debate they are subsequently willing to use to legitimize more power being assigned to them for the sake of keeping the community "safe". The very agents of division are complaining about the division they themselves create.
Please take a moment to appreciate the surrealist absurdity of all this:

In the recent discussion on sponsorship policies, someone calls out an ongoing power grab on GitHub
NixOS/foundation#128 (comment) screen
NixOS foundation board observer RaitoBezarius denying on GitHub that there is a power grab, speaking of "power grab fantasies."
NixOS/foundation#128 (comment) screen
Days later, the same RaitoBezarius boosting a post on Mastodon where someone else says: all the fascists will get kicked out
https://hachyderm.io/@leftpaddotpy/112248186696362113 screen
The author of this post leaning into the myth of fascism for exclusionary purposes counts on moderation team member piegames to enact such left-leaning identitarian policies inside the Nix community: "please talk to piegames, they're very involved in making this happen and it will help our future advocacy for better board composition" (Targeting the foundation board members, the most important of which is Eelco Dolstra)
https://hachyderm.io/@leftpaddotpy/112248495631909404
The appearance of an open letter calling for the ousting and expropriation of the project founder from his life's work, saying that "Eelco should resign from all of his formal roles in the project and take at least a 6 months break from involvement at all, to allow the community ownership of the project to get on its feet in practice."
https://save-nix-together.org/
The moderation team member Hexa posts the letter publicly, while the authors of the letter want to repress criticism of their power grab preemptively because it might increase "moderation load."
https://lobste.rs/s/0qvtim/open_letter_nixos_foundation mirror
Most likely we are going to see complaints about concern trolls and similar things in the future, when people start to make critical remarks, with people on certain Mastodon instances complaining about fascists and what not. All the while telling others how tired they are and how they want their time to be respected.

This cycle of the theater of the absurd needs to end. The friends of the infernal identitarian game need to be tamed. Actual moderation - the virtue of moderation - needs to replace identitarian division.
In all this, the moderation team plays a crucial role, as we can already see. Its reform is therefore the most important step. Without its power being so blatantly abused for political gain at this point, none of this would have been possible. They will deny it, of course, or deflect as they have done on numerous occasions, which is why we are left, reluctantly, with no choice but to compile this document of proof.
In any case, the moderation team being the only institution that has the power to decide who does and does not belong to "the community", it appears imperative to us that it should be prevented from leaning into identitarian exclusionary ideologies - as it has sadly been doing increasingly in recent months.
While the failed RFC 98 already tried to use the myth of fascism as an exclusionary device against moderate voices all out in the open, we can see the same machinations now operating in a more piecemeal fashion, and in a more secretive way, trying to harm the project at its core.
What this means to contributors not aligned with this identitarian closure's strict political evaluation scheme (it is sadly very eager and not lazy at all) can be seen from the examples collected below: to us, it looks very much like personal defamation, intimidation, and exclusion.
We are fully aware that because this account of the recent past relies on our unique experiences, each of the reasons we present here can be disputed on various grounds. However, we believe this presentation of how things have appeared to us to be worthwhile to be seen by the eyes of others.
May all discern for themselves.
The freedom of discernment shall never be sacrificed.
1) Current moderation culture is not equitable in that it does not abide by reasons accessible or explicable to all
1.1 There are no discernible general reasons guiding moderation decisions. tldr: it's a giant mess
It appears to us that there is no transparent standard for what distinguishes a right from a wrong moderation decision at the moment. Nobody can really know what it is that the moderation team bases its decisions on. Nobody therefore is able to form clear expectations as to what is and isn't allowed and when and where and why. All of this can be decided on the spot without any reliable standard.
Hence, it is unknown by which goal the moderation team is actually governed in its decision-making. We might have arrived at a suspicion by now, but to newcomers, this is all necessarily opaque.
And this in spite of the fact that the moderation team is taken to uphold the NixOS foundation mission statement by RFC 102 and that the moderation team adopted a Code of Conduct as late as November 2023. One wonders how the team relates to these documents?
In a recent debate initiated by contributor Infinisil, moderator rhendric clarified the relationship of the moderation team to the Code of Conduct they themselves adopted. Instead of seeing the Code of Conduct as a document "that the moderation team uses to guide their decisions" as Infinisil thought, the following explanation was given:

[...] there is a CoC that reasonably describes what we're aiming for in our moderation processes. [...] if one of the bits of transparency you want is citing which part of the CoC got violated when we take action—we don't operate like that. We take the least potent moderation action needed to uphold the NixOS Foundation statement that RFC 102 tasks us with implementing, and we are guided by each other when we do that.
(Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 1:24 CET, Source: https://matrix.to/#/!uzGGsQXWXsuwIqJImY:nixos.org/$syzY0wQ9wM7c1usw-XxrmZpB5xjzNQlp7hy6rFCaAKM?via=nixos.org&via=matrix.org&via=nixos.dev screen)

Surprisingly then, the Code of Conduct appears to stand in no discernible relation to the actual decisions being made. The decisions aren't based on the prescriptions of the Code in any way. Which raises the question: Why does the Code exist in the first place? And how can it "reasonably describe" anything at this point?
The authors of this document, being the liberal people that they are, stand firm in the belief that what is not forbidden is allowed. Anything else would undermine the necessary spontaneity of contributors in an open environment. It would burden them with fear of unjust punishment at a moment's notice. We need an understanding in advance of what is forbidden. Such an understanding is notably absent.
How this plays out in the concrete could be seen from the circumstances of Srid's ban in November 2023. When asked to remove the link to https://srid.ca/unwoke from his Discourse page, he asked for the moderation team to establish a general rule banning all such similar statements from being linked on community platforms publicly. This perfectly reasonable demand was not adhered to in the slightest, or apparently even considered.
What is the conclusion that we would draw from this explanation?
The moderation team refuses to abide by general reasons to guide their moderation decisions which in our view violates a basic principle of equity. All people have a right to know in advance what the rules of interaction are. And these rules need to be applied equally to all.
1.2 Concrete reasons are never provided but only ever demanded from others. tldr: it's double standards once you start looking
In addition to the absence of general principles, one might be inclined to say that general principles are replaced by case-by-case decisions, but cases are explained only in abstract terms, never in relation to concrete evidence.
This we shall see now, leads to an ironic double standard making moderation decisions effectively unaccountable all while being incomprehensible to those affected by them.
In the aftermath of Srid's ban in November 2023, a certain number of people publicly raised concerns that this ban was entirely unjustified. There was the open suspicion that Srid's ban was motivated by political ideology while the moderation team claimed this was due to his being "confrontational."
In this context, long-standing contributor Shea Levy asked contributor and moderation team lead Ryan Mullgian on GitHub whether Srid's ban was due to certain political views he had linked in his Discourse profile:

@NixOS/moderation: @srid claims that this ban was due to a link to https://srid.ca/unwoke in his Discourse profile. Is that correct?
https://github.com/NixOS/moderation/commit/e9d67b7efa03e6e9bc0bf2d03c6344d60c103395#commitcomment-132517786 screen

To which Ryan Mulligan provided the following answer:

On multiple occasions, Srid derailed discussions into a general political/philosophical debate. Several posts have been hidden/deleted because they also contained inflammatory speech. Several community members have reported their discomfort with Srid. In that context, his Discourse profile was seen as yet another provocation. In response to this, Srid was given a warning. We asked him to stop being so confrontational, to remove the link to that page on his profile, and to not link to it again in the future, among other things. He partially complied but refused to change or remove that link, then later continued to escalate by posting a public poll on Discourse about this moderation question. This poll is exactly the behavior we are trying to stop. We will not let our community be turned into a general debate club or a circus. The suspension was precipitated from him posting the poll and is the result of considering all this.
https://github.com/NixOS/moderation/commit/e9d67b7efa03e6e9bc0bf2d03c6344d60c103395#commitcomment-132624102 screen

Notice how this answer provides no concrete reasons for Srid's ban. It deals only in generalities that are unverifiable. Nobody can look up the multiple occasions of Srid derailing discussions, no one can see the hidden or deleted posts to judge whether they were inflammatory or harmless, and nobody knows whether the discomfort that community members might have had was due to Srid's actual behavior or rather due to their own adherence to aggressive identitarian ideologies that construed Srid as an ideological enemy.
What everyone can verify, however, is that Srid is deeply committed to being as harmless as possible, and has since formulated his own Code of Conduct based on this principle. A strange contrast.
This evidently insufficient response led contributor David Arnold (blaggacao) - who to our dismay has also since been banned by the moderation team, a team he helped create in RFC 102 - to open a thread on moderation accountability.2 This thread, because of the controversial nature of the decision, got somewhat more emotional with several apparent adherents of left-leaning identitarian ideologies becoming aggressive. The moderation team decided to lock it down, delist it from Discourse and later even heavily censor it, removing 13 of the original posts even after it was unlisted and hence hidden from public search results. However, the original version has been preserved in this particular case.3
At the very end of that thread, in a message that still stands at the time of this writing, the same moderation team member Ryan Mulligan demanded from their critics:

If you find that your private concerns aren’t handled, then you could consider making some polite public post with a concretely argued position rater than some vague concern.
Moderator Ryan Mulligan
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/moderation-team-accountability-issues/35482/71 mirror

Abstract declamations unto thee! But only concrete reasons unto me!
What shall we conclude from this? Not providing concrete explanations to others, but demanding the most concrete explanation if others intend to hold you accountable.
It is fairly evident to us, that this makes for a good basis for all sorts of double standards! It also makes accountability next to impossible. Because unless you know what a decision was based upon, how could you investigate if it was done correctly?
We believe that this practice cannot continue. The lack of transparency and the arbitrary nature of moderation decisions not only undermine trust but also fail to respect the community's right to understand the rationale behind significant actions that affect its members.
2) The moderation team appears to kindle enmity between community members. tldr: some are more equal than others
2.1) The moderation team kindles attitudes which are potentially harmful to others. tldr: this is not nice!
In light of the power grab that doesn't want to be called one, mentioned at the beginning, we shall now explore how the moderation team is enabling a certain type of aggressive activism that sows enmity between contributors.
That this is indeed so has become apparent to us once we gained the impression that there exists an effort to suppress only certain kinds of political speech (see the ban of Srid where no general rule was admitted) while enabling others, even if these others are highly disconcerting.
Since a few people have raised the issue over the last few months of banning political speech altogether from the Nix community, a situation that might seem preferable to the present one, the moderation team at one point had to clarify their stance on the matter.
This clarification is important. One of the more serious attempts in the direction of restricting political speech was made by contributor Jon Ringer creating a PR for a ban on unacceptable political activism:

To help avoid controversy in the future, I would still like to see NixOS/.github#16 or something like that added to the CoC. Just make the expectations clear that those things are better tackled outside Nix Platforms.
Contributor Jon Ringer, Tue, Mar 12, 2024, NixOS Governance Room on Matrix
https://matrix.to/#/!VyoUhyWvlhSpFWWxHL:matrix.org/$W6QrMhOJbtwjxL3-yquzfuxchLJHUWqFzfjeCh9fc0U?via=nixos.org&via=matrix.org&via=nixos.dev screen

The moderation team did not follow up on this proposal to restrict political speech more generally in any positive way but was rather dismissive of it. In the context of this PR, the following explanation was given by the moderation team:

[...] we are probably not going to impose a ban on political activism. The tone of the activism isn't necessarily the discriminating factor either. We won't allow activism that is counter to our mission of ‘providing an intentionally welcoming and safe environment where all feel valued and cared for’.
Moderator rhendric, Tue, Mar 12, 2024, NixOS Governance Room on Matrix
https://matrix.to/#/!VyoUhyWvlhSpFWWxHL:matrix.org/$FC6KAUDoSdZXyBiMX39ShZlxkGgkh1u1tDLEvDQqkDs?via=nixos.org&via=matrix.org&via=nixos.dev screen

Notice that the tone of the activism is not a discriminating factor for the moderation team. This might already be an indication that certain types of activism are allowed to become uncivil in the community, and in our estimation, they are allowed to become uncivil to such an extent as to become verbally abusive of other community members and put significant emotional strain on them.
This becomes particularly evident in a sequence of events all relating to one such politically activist-minded community member, we shall call him J for the sake of some minimal anonymization. To us, J appears to be entertaining a special relationship to the moderation team that some might say constitutes a form of favoritism.
Over the course of the recent months, since the ban of Srid and the adoption of the Code of Conduct in Nov 2023, we have observed the following incidents:


Defenders of the first Anduril sponsorship at the Europeans NixCon 2023 who participated in the discussion on Discourse have been termed "murder machine apologists" by J in the NixOS foundation Matrix room, likening them linguistically to people who defend actual murder. We believe that such rhetoric is inappropriate in a professional setting.
As we shall see, however, this is not an isolated incident. It is also worth noting that these defamed people were deemed "not, in fact, people who create a safe environment for marginalized folk", hence the attack was made in the context for an argument using the myth of marginalization against an imaginary enemy - normal community members mind you! - to be vilified.
https://matrix.to/#/!CJXQiUGqNPcFonEdME:nixos.org/$GNOHzZx-f_7Fkkgg4f4auQpTNa9tB4aa33oHQxzArwg?via=nixos.org&via=matrix.org&via=nixos.dev screen


In the already mentioned hidden thread on Discourse, opened by David Arnold (blaggacao), J claimed an unidentified post of Srid was a "bigoted screed that is exactly the sort of thing written by people who - quite literally - intend to murder us marginalized folks, or wish for others to do so." Thereby likening Srid to people with - quite literal - homicidal intent against minorities. This claim does establish a pattern: Creating a rhetorical resemblance between an actual behavior with a really hideous behavior, apt to do harm against the public image of a contributor to the Nix community.
https://srid.ca/nixos-mod/accountability-thread


In late 2023 a long-standing contributor to nixpkgs was attacked verbally by J for his attempt to raise a critical question with respect to J's behavior. J claimed that this critical attempt was tantamount to "clear-cut abuser behavior" and running "experiments on people's emotional state without their consent", in this case on J's emotional state. We should note that there is no evidence in our mind that these depictions given by J even come close to an accurate account of the situation.
Rather what is striking to us is that, just like in the cases above, J yet again likens other community members' behavior rhetorically to a particularly horrid kind of behavior, in this case to a scientist running unethical experiments on people against their will. Obviously no such thing ever happened. However, this creates yet another instance of the aforementioned rhetorical pattern. Needless to say there were no public statements against this behavior from the moderation team.
https://matrix.to/#/!VyoUhyWvlhSpFWWxHL:matrix.org/$Y-ndXmAfGUXPPfOD_YvOE59pj8gQzp1kI4tBdXQR13w?via=nixos.org&via=matrix.org&via=nixos.dev screen


To the moderation team J has claimed that there has been a streak of harassment going on for years, presumably against him and some people like him. We have found no indication of this being true. The claim appears to us to be overly dramatic and somewhat construed.


When first contributor Jon Ringer and later contributor David Arnold (blaggacao) tried to intervene on the aforementioned situation in late 2023, Jon Ringer was first verbally assaulted by J, and David Arnold's attempt at mediation led to his unprovoked ban by the moderation team. We note that the kind of behavior David Arnold showed was something one might expect from anyone in a community with a healthy and open culture of communication. As some of the relevant messages in this context have later been redacted, they are no longer to be easily found on Matrix.


A while later J decided that it might be a good idea if he gave private political lessons to people.
In the context of the awareness of J's past behavior, one of the two authors of this RFC decided to raise a few clarification questions with respect to J's offer. This was done in order to prevent other people from being harmed given that there appeared to be an established pattern of such things being possible.
Once these questions were posted, the moderation team felt obliged to make an official statement on Discourse. The name has obviously been redacted, as this is primarily about the moderation team:

As a community, we’ve recently struggled to have conversations related to this idea without overheating. I’m encouraged by J’s attitude and approach here, and I would like to see this experiment succeed. Given the volatility of the subject, I’d like to ask everyone who might be interested in having J as a tutor to remember periodically to reflect on your emotional temperature, and to bias yourself toward taking some time to cool off if you need it. [...] Respectful speech remains a basic expectation of NixOS spaces.
Moderator rhendric's official statement
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/open-offer-politics-in-tech-sessions/40097/3 mirror

We find this statement to be highly disconcerting. Given the lack of respectfulness and civility we experienced coming from J, and the moderation team's evident awareness of this, who is the addressee of these demands? Is the respectfulness only an expectation raised against some, but not against others? Is civility a demand only held against a certain subsection of the community?
If the moderation team does not wish to engage in "tone-policing," as some might say, we note that such tone-policing was no problem when moderator Hexa intervened against contributor amjospeh on GitHub, leading to amjoseph quitting the project over concerns with this approach to governance. His statement reads like this: "@amjoseph-nixpkgs You need to tone done your commit messages and start communicating with others, continued collaboration really isn't going to work any other way." NixOS/nixpkgs#282220 (comment) screen
Is tone-policing acceptable against highly productive contributors, but not against people giving political lessons to others with what appears to us to be a history of verbal aggressiveness?
But most importantly perhaps, how shall we take it that the moderation team was encouraged by J’s attitude? At that time J had already established quite an attitudinal pattern of verbally attacking other community members. Community members which the moderation team chose not to protect in public from such attacks.
And if that wasn't enough already, there is much more disconcerting information to be found on J's personal website indicating that such an attitudinal pattern is much older than the events of the last few months might indicate on their own. As this website is publicly accessible, and the moderation might well be aware of it, we think it is well within their responsibilities to check on whom they confer their trust in improving the community.
At the time of this writing (2024/19/04) J's personal website contains the following statements about himself:

In case it hasn't become obvious to you yet, I am a social engineer. Full-time. 24/7. I use manipulation and other psychological tactics in nearly every conversation I have. I will try to change the way you think, and try to solve problems you might not even realize you had.

And somewhat further down:

The only case where I will escalate a situation to more severe things (think doxing), is when I have already talked to you, and you actively refuse to listen while harming others in the process. Very few people have ever reached this stage.

We do not link this website here, as it might be somewhat disturbing to read it all, however it is easy to find these statements.
The real question we wish to raise however is this: Why does the moderation team officially find the attitudes towards political discourse of someone with this pattern on the public record encouraging? Bear in mind that none of this contains secret or private information. It is all things that are easy to come by within minutes to anyone responsible enough to go and look them up.
To us this only makes sense in light of an attempt of abusing the moderation team's authority for strengthening the foothold of identitarian ideologies inside the Nix community. Recent events appear to us to confirm this.
Do you, dear reader, wish to become the object of full-time social engineering, and then, in case you resist said social engineering to an extent that the social engineer judges to be harmful, be potentially subjected to doxing?
And this all the while the moderation team is telling the community that the political attitudes of the one doing, by his own admission, social engineering 24/7, are encouraging?
We do not.
2.2) How identitarian activists view other community members. tldr: you are beneath them!
As a last piece, we wish to share what political attitude might be behind all this. In a more recent controversy, which also got closed down and then hidden from the public eye by the moderation team, said user J made clear how he views communication with other members of our technical community:

There is no discussion “with peers” to be had here.

This denial of others being his peers, which is a denial of their baseline equality as community members, with him ascribing himself a special competence when it comes to political questions, a competence that is unaccountable to others, appears to us to be at the core of the problem.

If you’re not qualified, then you should be leaving these considerations to the people who are, instead of trying to inject yourself or your opinions into them.

Other people's opinions are no longer solicited. When it comes to political disagreements, only one side is to be heard; the other is to be silent. The injunction to obey in silence and not share one's opinions could hardly be expressed more clearly.
To us, these statements are the hallmark of aggressive left-wing identitarianism, getting verbally abusive against others in order to establish a hierarchy of dominance.
Let us ask you directly one more time, dear reader: would you find encouragement in these attitudes when your goal was to lead this community, a community you are a part of, into less turbulent waters? Would choosing this person to give political lessons to others be seen as encouraging in the eyes of anyone else knowing about this sequence of events?
And would you have trust in the competence of those authorities who did choose to support such messengers? We leave this judgement to you.
To us, there was nothing encouraging to be found here.
To us, this is no "intentionally welcoming and safe environment where all feel valued and cared for."
3) Revisiting Srid's ban and its aftermath. tldr: there is no justification, it's all personal for the "moderation" team.
Let us finally come to a particularly interesting topic: Srid's ban. Or rather the unknown aftermath of it. As the best documentation of the ban itself and the circumstances leading to it is ironically provided by Srid himself, in what we find is an extremely objective and calm statement, given that he was on the receiving end of a massive abuse of power.4
We already mentioned how the moderation team was not willing or able to publicly state which concrete reasons actually motivated the ban. This led to one of the two authors to begin an attempt to figure out what the reasons for Srid's ban actually were and how they could be addressed constructively.
This attempt at constructive improvement ended with what appears to be a vindictive lashing out by the moderation team, in particular moderator Hexa, against banned contributor Srid and a blatant breach of the trust that was placed in private communication.
Private communication with the moderation team was initiated in December after Srid's ban, because moderator Ryan Mulligan had given the following promise to the community as a whole:

We'll continue communicating with Srid and there is opportunity for redemption if he's willing to participate constructively.
https://github.com/NixOS/moderation/commit/e9d67b7efa03e6e9bc0bf2d03c6344d60c103395#commitcomment-132624102 screen

So the moderation team was taken up on their promise, the communication between them and Srid was supposed to be in private, and accompanied by one of the two authors of this RFC. This was done to prevent any mutual escalation from happening yet again. As Ryan had claimed that Srid "derailed discussions" on "multiple occasions", it seemed important that no such escalation was to happen yet again.
As the moderation team insisted on Srid making the first attempt to establish communication, Srid was encouraged to do so, and in fact did with a short email asking for possible terms of his return into the Nix community. That was on Dec 12, 2023. And then nothing happened. No response, just silence. So we waited. Every two weeks, Srid was writing a new message to the moderation team, following up on his request.
On Sun, Jan 21, 2024, we finally got a response from the moderation team, barely 6 weeks after the initial short email was written. The nature of the response left us bitterly disappointed. Srid's return into the Nix community was rejected on very spurious grounds by moderator Hexa.
However, only a few hours before writing this email, Hexa himself had intervened on a harmless post that Srid had made on lobste.rs, where Srid was presenting a Nix tutorial he had been working on.
Without any provocation and in complete abuse of the authority given to him as a NixOS moderation team member, which is limited to Nix community platforms, and clearly not intended to harm people outside such platforms, the following statement was made in an official sounding voice:

I’m a member of NixOS moderation team, see https://nixos.org/community/teams/moderation. Srid was banned (https://github.com/NixOS/moderation/commit/e9d67b7efa03e6e9bc0bf2d03c6344d60c103395) from our community, and is now trying to drive traffic to their third party communication platform.
Moderator Hexa intervening publicly outside the Nix community without provocation against Srid while private communication was ongoing
https://archive.is/Z2BU3 & https://archive.is/75A7j

As a result of this intervention, a moderator on lobste.rs decided to ban Srid on very dubious grounds. It stands to reason that personal connections between the two teams are behind this ban of Srid on lobste.rs. We noted initially that Irene Knapp, the main author of the failed RFC 98, is part of the moderation team on lobste.rs. However, such things remain in the realm of speculation and cannot be proven at this time.
What is certain though is that community moderation ends at the boundaries of that very community. This boundary was evidently crossed, creating more harm for Srid in the process, all while private communication was still ongoing.
The attempt to privately communicate with the moderation team appears to us to have been abused for engaging in what we can only see as an act of personal vindictiveness. At least we do not see any possibility for a good-faith interpretation of these events. Evidently no explanation of this move was ever given to anyone involved.
For all we can say, the earlier statement by Ryan Mulligan on behalf of the entire team, appears to have been a lie to the entire community, designed to distract rather than to actually work constructively on a path forward for Srid. We received no signs of constructive communication ever being intended.
We can only warn anyone else in the future: As long as the present hierarchy is in place, do not put any trust in the claim that solutions can be found in private communication. Our experience has shown us that the most likely explanation for why private communication is preferred is the attempt by the current moderation hierarchy to protect itself against public scrutiny and accountability.
The moderation team in its present institutional and personal setup cannot be trusted to communicate faithfully in private.
In order to ensure that this situation sees a swift and substantial improvement we have created the two proposals joint together in our RFC.
5) Ending on a positive note: What we would wish for
Ending on a positive note after so many negative experiences might be a good idea, we thought.
Others should understand what we would wish for instead of what we experienced. Our proposal is not designed to enact any kind of personal vendetta like the ones we apparently had to witness ourselves. Instead, it is meant to ensure that such behavior is no longer possible in the future.
In particular, we wish for:


Civility in interaction as a demand to all and anyone. We have seen examples of uncivil language above. We wish this to be replaced with civility.


One normative standard applied to all. This does not mean inflexibility in recognizing individual hardship. But it means no differences in normative status based on political affiliation or presumed identity.


An end to the divisive agitation of identitarian activism inside this technical project. The behavior and language this entails has done enough damage on an overall societal level already.


And finally, and maybe most importantly: We wish that the present situation be overcome, a more equitable scheme of moderation be implemented. But that no resentment be felt against any of the present or past members of the moderation team.


We view this as an institutional problem not an individual problem. It is the way this institution has been set up and has grown organically which led to this situation, not the inherent character of people. The institution being ill-founded combined with the influence of the identitarian snare gave rise to the possibility of such a streak of bad behavior. Let us not condemn this bad behavior more than is inevitable to see the necessity of change.
Let us reform the institution of the moderation team instead and ensure that such events have no future.



By a myth, we understand an ultimately irrational fiction devoid of a factual base, used to create group cohesion and legitimize harmful behavior against those designated as out-group or threats to the in-group. In this sense, the myth of marginalization creates the in-group, while the myth of fascism creates an external enemy. Or in our case: it is used to attack other contributors and users, potentially harming them in the process, under the false pretense of them being an actual threat. ↩


The original thread is to be found here: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/moderation-team-accountability-issues/35482 mirror ↩


This preserved version which was provided to Srid by an anonymous source can be found here: https://srid.ca/nixos-mod/accountability-thread ↩


We assume that the account that Srid himself gave of the circumstances of his ban is public knowledge by now. In case it is not, the link is provided: https://srid.ca/nixos-mod ↩



