Open Source Does Not Imply Open Community

Sure, but the problem here is far more insidious. By latching into delicate and, at times, controversial issues, CoC may hold a project hostage and threaten character assassination.

Imagine that for some bizarre reason, CoC establishes that issues are only to be talked about on Mondays. People can comply, or they can leave, no biggie. Strange but clear cut.

Now, say it instead establishes whatever politically motivated consideration. The choice now becomes one of positioning oneself into the current political climate. This makes sense at times, but also leaves a door open for abuse akin to rules lawyering, gotchas and crybullying. Sometimes creates a phantom HR that has no interest beyond exerting its power and which does d with no accountability.

Problem is anyone raising this as an issue or rejecting such proposal is going to look bad while doing so. It's easier to keep your head low.

Do you think open source projects just had to put up with anything and everything before they came along? No, if someone was being an active detriment to the project, they'd get naturally pushed away by the project leader, who was usually also the top contributor, in a clear and transparent manner. If the rest of the contributors agreed, that was that. If not, they could always fork. No drama needed, everyone was free to judge for themselves.

CoCs were introduced not only to to take that power from the leader or top contributors and hand it over to cliques of political activists, who often do not contribute to the project at all in terms of actually writing code, but also to allow them to invoke it in vague and secretive ways, for reasons that most actual contributors likely wouldn't agree with. Obviously, this leads to drama. You'll notice that CoC drama almost always boils down not to "this person is generally agreed to be a detriment to the project" but to "this person said or did something that offended me and thus violated the CoC".

You didn't talk about being interested in what maintainers were up to. You talked about what your friends are interested in! That's the thing! We need to decentralize the decision making. If your friend is juggling some patches, some feature branches atop code you use, that is interesting. We seem to both agree that we do want to have interest & awareness.

We've only had one model for social ness ever and it's created enormous pinch-points, enormous thin-waist problems for getting stuff done. The maintainers themselves keep saying they can't handle the loads, don't enjoy it, don't want to. I think the submission is kind of a bad spirited loser but I'm sympathetic! I just think it's worth exploring pro social options before we all default to shutting down turning off all the exterior signals and going dark, like suggested. That sounds a lot like being a loser to me. Fine, do you! It sucks though, it really does. Everyone should hope aspire to & work for better. Let's discuss what that might look like.