They are an excellent writer, so it's a loss for them to leave, but I can't shake the feeling that people who look for a sense of community in an OSS project are barking up the wrong tree.
Can it exist? Sure, but it seems to have a lot more fragility for various reasons we can all guess at. I don't think your local book-club or whatever community has the same weaknesses.
Glad that's not what happened here. The best people were excommunicated and burned at the stake for their heretical views because they didn't purge the toxic fundamentalists from the project.
Hacker culture is inherently antiauthoritarian, therefore queer and leftist. If you have a problem with queer leftists in your hacker community, you are the problem and need to leave.
I don't doubt that queer and leftist people gravitate towards hacker culture, but how does queer and leftist follow from antiauthoritarian? The majority of people are still, and will always be non-queer, and a significant portion of antiauthoritarians are not leftist.
Now the grandparent comment got [flagged]. Posting again for posterity:
>Hacker culture is inherently antiauthoritarian, therefore queer and leftist.
Best example of Poe's Law that I've seen on HN in ages. Leftism is hilariously authoritarian, and hacking culture never had anything to do with sexuality/gender.
>If you have a problem with queer leftists in your hacker community, you are the problem and need to leave.
Yes, I have a problem with totalitarian, authoritarian fundamentalist leftist. If you're OK with them in your hacker community, you are the problem and need to leave.
This is what happens when you allow terminally online totalitarian leftists into your project. They cannot operate without purging the opposition. I'll cite John O’Sullivan’s First Law:
"All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing ... The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows."
Can it exist? Sure, but it seems to have a lot more fragility for various reasons we can all guess at. I don't think your local book-club or whatever community has the same weaknesses.