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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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About what you'd expect, I guess.

Vaxry's largely moved away from keeping parity with wlroots main, and instead rewritten and built into hypr the necessary parts of the library -- breaks a bit from the Linux ethos, and likely to make keeping up with bugfixes and such either direction impossible, but may have some advantages for hypr. The community has had a few We're Doing Moderation Better posts, but they're mostly working on actually improving moderation rather than just throwing in a CoC for someone to abuse.

The hypr-based software that was previously being considered by a mainstream distro, hyprcursor, got dropped out of the running for Weird And Not Good Reasons, and there's probably some other related software components that would be good candidates otherwise but are being ignored because of The Drama. There are already projects that have disavowed any hyprland compatibility, and distros that have rejected hypr for social-not-political reasons. There have been broken things on specific equipment or distros where the FDO ban has been a problem, though to my knowledge a surmountable one so far.

FreeDesktop.Org's main website is broken in a bunch of ways that it always has been, but some of these problems (spam issues) make it difficult to tell the downstream results there. Could be that the lack of hypr-related posts in recent days are just no one wanting to do it, could be that accounts doing anything related to the topic aren't getting approved, could be that no one wants to do it because they don't want their account getting blown up.

That said, there's been less impact than I expected: hyprdots has remained active, maintained, and uncancelled/unbrigaded, and while hackernews stories do get the inevitable "worst community ever" comments, it's not the only thing that happens.

There's been some efforts to cancel DeVault over past reddit comments and moderation, as well as an alleged danbooru account, that I'm not going to link publicly. There's some interesting human-watching in it all coming out after his role in the Vaxry stuff, while the page itself points instead to the Stallman cancellation DeVault also championed, but a) that might just be because DeVault's hit on Stallman focused on related topics, b) only got him out of a few social media accounts, rather than any clear impact in code spaces, and c) does have a bit of Pepe Silvia vibes going on.

Vaxry has not come out as trans or nonbinary, to my knowledge.