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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 3:11 PM

    And you can call this oversensitive, feel-good "woke" nonsense if you want, but I've got the data and I'm right: a code of conduct, community standards and moderation enforcing them, the psychological safety of your community, these are near term competitive advantages and long term survival necessities. Treating the process of getting involved and the experience of staying involved in your community _as a product_, worthy of usability testing and ergonomic refinement, that moves the needle.

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Replies

  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 3:19 PM

    We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.

    I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 3:53 PM

    On the other side of that coin, the psychological safety part of it, a true story: I'm the guy who killed IRC at Mozilla. I'm proud of it.

    One of the reasons I'm proud of it is the mobile IRC bouncers that didn't let people delete old DMs so I got to have conversations with colleagues where they showed me pages and pages and pages of vicious scrollback harassment that they had to endure for their jobs, sitting in their phones forever.

    The feature request was "I just want this to stop."

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:02 PM

    The move to Matrix was partly driven by their open source commitments - hi, @matrix , hey yo, love you all - but they mostly won on the strength of two things. First that their accessibility posture was not just unrivalled in terms of FOSS forums but that their team jumped at the chance to work with us improve it.

    But 2nd: the moderation tools are unmatched. Nothing else comes close.

    Once you have tools and process in place to ablate harassment, nobody willingly goes back to not having that.

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:08 PM

    Like, OK, we've got clean running water now, we've got soap, we've got [checks notes] the forum management equivalent of an orbital ion cannon for dealing with the abuse or harassment of our community in our open forums., and I guess we're on our way to penicillin. We're going to be OK.

    Being trusted to provide the foundations and tooling of that psychological safety to a team of the finest people I have ever worked with, and delivering on that promise, has been the high point of my career.

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:15 PM

    But again, there it's the same story. Matrix is still a _little_ convoluted as far as onboarding is concerned, but it beats the heck out of IRC's "learn a new OS and hope you don't get disconnected" cliffs-of-Dover learning curve, and the numbers again reflected that. Invest in community accessibility, and community safety and tooling ergonomics, and the line goes up.

    Not a line made out of rageclicks, manipulation and misery, just the steady growth of a community worth being a part of.

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:36 PM

    Anyway: the Linux kernel could have that. Any community can have that, really. But the real work is the humility of admitting you might need it.

    And a lot of people - not just proud but _justifiably_ proud, for all their accomplishments and success - can easily find themselves trapped in the kind of blind spot you can only be trapped in by the atrophy of that humility, from a mere failure to welcome and foster enough diversity and dissent.

    Where you can no longer change without failing first.

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 5:00 PM

    Anyway: The worst thing an organization's leaders tolerate is what that organization becomes, and the blast radius of a single toxic contributor is huge and largely invisible. For everyone who speaks up to say this behavior isn't acceptable, there are dozens or hundreds of smart, competent people who peer into your community, see that this is how you live and move along without your ever knowing they exist, on their way to a better life somewhere else.

    We don't have to live like this.

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 7:59 PM

    A final, selfish addendum to this: I do consulting work around questions of cultural health, process improvement and accessible cultural change. If you'd like to have a conversation about that, let me know.

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  • MaddieM4MaddieM4@raphus.social
    Oct 15, 2026, 3:36 PM

    @mhoye much earlier this year I basically gave up on an attempt to contribute to Matplotlib because the process was so painful. Like, the existing code also had issues, but that's never a big deal for me. But I would need day job money to deal with their CI setup or their patch notes process, let alone both. It's not that I couldn't soldier through it if I needed to. It's that I couldn't justify spending my life that way.

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  • Martin Ueckeruecker@mastodon.social
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:24 PM

    @MaddieM4 @mhoye I tried to contribute to firefox a decade ago (or so) and the level complexity with the use of multiple languages meant that after going through multiple layers it become clear that implementing the simple feature I wanted to add would far exceed the time I could afford. I could imagine contributing to the kernel, but I will like opt for a simpler kernel that uses C exclusively for similar reasons... Too much industry-level complexity in Linux already.

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  • waffles 🇨🇦waffles@masto.yttrx.com
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:03 PM

    @mhoye sounds like a really shitty place to work if that behaviour was expected. was this via a public irc server or internal only?

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:11 PM

    @waffles The combination of the long running and deep seated cultural expectation of working in the open, the fact that for many years IRC was the only suitable tool for that and that later alternatives were almost all proprietary or otherwise closed meant we held onto it for very good, values-forward reasons, for a lot longer than we should have.

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  • technomancytechnomancy@hey.hagelb.org
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:29 PM

    @mhoye man, I wish my experience reflected this

    we have IRC and Matrix both as fully endorsed options and the Matrix route has dropped off significantly in the last few years; it's about a third or quarter of IRC at this point

    (they're bridged together and the bridging experience is kinda shit from the IRC side but pretty seamless from the Matrix side)

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  • U+002Ccb@treehouse.systems
    Oct 15, 2026, 7:42 PM

    @technomancy i was in shock about the moderation tools part. going to matrix for moderation tools is like going to the desert for water

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  • Like Mucas :pumpkin_ugh:mwl@io.mwl.io
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:45 PM

    @mhoye

    The more competent you are, the more important humility is.

    Never listen to your own press. Always put yourself in other people's places. Never internalize people's praise of you and your work. Always listen to others' experiences of your work, and of you.

    Yes, you have to decide who to listen to, but still.

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  • slashagreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
    Oct 15, 2026, 5:03 PM

    @mwl @mhoye

    "Always listen to others' experiences of your work, and of you."

    The very *best* yearly review I ever had was when my boss very directly told me what I was doing that he didn't want, and what he wanted me doing instead. Most reviews are generic, because bosses are uncomfortable with this sort of criticism. Which means neither of us gets better.

    It's ironic that my _worst_ rating was my *best* review.

    This is how we improve, both as employees and as people.

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  • slashagreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
    Oct 15, 2026, 5:23 PM

    @mwl It worked out well. I'm really good at hitting the target, once I'm told what it is. So I immediately pivoted, and did the things he _specifiec_ that he wanted.

    He came back in a month, telling me I was doing exactly what he wanted, and that -- if I kept it up -- we'd do a mid-year to erase my bad review, which would make me eligible for a raise at year-end.

    Until that point, I had no idea a bad review meant NO raises for _two_ years!

    Easily my best boss ever.

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  • Jonathan Corbetcorbet@social.kernel.org
    Oct 16, 2026, 1:18 PM
    @sackofbones @Netzblockierer @torvalds @mhoye Perhaps consider trusting a project (and its leader) that have delivered increasingly capable kernels and a strong development community for 35 years?

    I am not thrilled (to put it lightly) about this rush to LLMs, but I don't think that this sort of attitude makes things better.
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  • mirthmirth@mastodon.sdf.org
    Oct 15, 2026, 6:29 PM

    @mhoye I think the availability of robo-coding also lowers the casual contributor bar for fixing the couple problems they care about in a way sufficient for their own use, while the work to contribute upstream does not. A hostile upstream culture will just mean those changes get orphaned, or more forks or entirely new projects. That is not to say this is good, but the relative costs are shifting in a significant way.

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  • SackOfBones (any/all)sackofbones@kolektiva.social
    Oct 15, 2026, 6:34 PM

    @mirth Well that'll lower the overall quality of software, even if there isn't a hostile upstream culture and ai seen as just a tool*. It may be significant but that doesn't mean it'll last all that long, the titanic was pretty significant...

    * It isn't
    @mhoye

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  • Shae Erissonshapr@recurse.social
    Oct 15, 2026, 7:37 PM

    @mhoye this is also why ignore doesn't work in any community. New people assume the behavior they see is acceptable. You must actively remove people who exhibit unacceptable behavior.

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  • Thomas DepierreDi4na@hachyderm.io
    Oct 16, 2026, 3:09 AM

    @mhoye i work and plead mors on the build tool and compiler and rest of tech tool aspect side of things with the same arguments.

    And I think it is far less important than the one you point out (and probably harder to fix funnily enough).

    So thank you for expressing it <3

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  • rcgj, procrastinator 1°- 4° (at times)rcgj_OxPhys@floss.social
    Oct 15, 2026, 10:32 PM

    @cyberquixote @wronglang @mhoye iirc, that's what Linus thought: smth along the lines of "hey guys, here's a quick hack to use until that microkernel good stuff takes over"

    Edit: Ish. """
    […] in a public newsgroup, Torvalds […] argu[ed] MINIX has inherent design flaws (naming the lack of multithreading as a specific example), while acknowledging that he finds the microkernel kernel design to be superior "from a theoretical and aesthetical" point of view"
    """ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbau

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:21 PM

    @owen When we got it spun up, the weapon of choice was called Mjolnir. Today, you want to look at its successor Draupnir.

    You need to know a _little_ about how Matrix communications are structured and work, but relatively little. Single-action org-wide banning, per-user or per-origin, is a delight, and retroactive redact was something that a few free-as-in-speechies objected to until the day I had to clean up a goatse flood, they came around pretty quick after that.

    github.com/the-draupnir-projec

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  • Owenowen@mastodon.transneptune.net
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:32 PM

    @mhoye Thanks.

    Going off a quick read, it seems like a lot of its underlying thesis is in the direction that if you have to moderate someone in one spot, odds are they've been up to antisocial nonsense in several, and you might want to act on them without having to individually find and adjudicate them. That tracks - but am I reading it right?

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  • Owenowen@mastodon.transneptune.net
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:33 PM

    @mhoye (The background radiation of most moderation on the internet is to treat each incident as a one-off; tooling for addressing repeat customers is frequently weak)

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:41 PM

    @owen During my full-time involvement, it was still true that moderators had to generally keep track of disparate acts across forums, and communicate appropriately.

    Early on, this was a lot of administrative work for me - most abusers get away with it by being perfectly nice to most people - but after a while I'd built up enough credibility that people came to value the safety of their colleagues in other fora very highly.

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  • Sam Sneddon 🏳️‍⚧️gsnedders@glauca.space
    Oct 15, 2026, 9:30 PM

    @mhoye The unfortunate thing about the move to Matrix is significantly more discussion started happening on Mozilla-internal Slack at the same time, and that really killed some of the open-by-default vibes, with some people scarcely checking Matrix.

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 9:38 PM

    @gsnedders That didn't happen at the same time; the reality is that IRC usability was, compared to what was available, just so bad for so long that long before a single Mozilla slack instance was blessed, long before I was sent to get us an alternative to IRC, there were already _dozens and dozens_ of private shadow Slack instances all over the place for various teams and projects. Like, on the order of 180 of them. One of the biggest impetuses for moving to Slack was... most people already had.

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  • Sam Sneddon 🏳️‍⚧️gsnedders@glauca.space
    Oct 16, 2026, 12:33 AM

    @mhoye My recollection is very much that enough people were vaguely on IRC, even if a lot of the discussion was happening in the Slacks, to an extent that is no longer true with Matrix?

    Like, you had both having to change the communication channel that was infrequently used by many people, plus the single Slack instance made possible more cross-team communication to happen within the private channels.

    Certainly the stuff I was around (mostly platform, and especially a bunch of the tools & automation stuff), it was very much around the time of the Matrix move that much more discussion moved into private spheres.

    (And like, I’m not gonna say that other corporate driven projects are better in this regard, but forcing people to transition to a new tool can definitely make this worse. And I’m certainly not defending IRC here, but it was at the time of the migration that things got worse as an occasional contributor.)

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  • Octobers Georguep@timeloop.cafe
    Oct 15, 2026, 11:21 PM

    @mhoye this is a great thread, and I agree with all of it except this tangential point.

    Matrix moderation tools are a chaotic mess. Some of that is inherent distsys problems, some of that is missing / bad protocol design or poor integration. Not all of it is directly related to moderation being a reactive afterthought, but is compounded by the combination of that with general matrix desync artifacts.

    Speaking from experience doing matrix moderation, notably during an especially nasty period a year or two ago, there is plenty of capability left to build. While the more centralised platforms have some inherent advantages here, that's not the only reason their moderation capabilities are easier to operate effectively.

    There are tools. Many different variants, even. That they are better than what IRC has is not in dispute, but that's the lowest of low bars.

    ETA: The people building the tools are working on the fringes and get easily burned out, for obvious additional reasons beyond all the normal and accelerating reasons everyone else is These Days.

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  • mhoye but seasonally spookymhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 15, 2026, 11:24 PM

    @uep so, it’s been 3+ years admittedly but that was not my experience at all. I don’t want to tell you you’re holding it wrong, and I haven’t had an opportunity to flex the new Draupnir tooling, but my experience was definitely not what you’re describing.

    (Slack’s moderation tools basically don’t exist and IRC’s are trash, on this we agree)

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  • Octobers Georguep@timeloop.cafe
    Oct 15, 2026, 11:35 PM

    @mhoye yeah, there's good stuff, but ultimately there were two key issues (and lots of smaller ones and compounding effects)

    1. it's largely based on reactive bots acting to delete things after the fact, so The Stuff still gets seen, and seen differently by people on different servers, clients, etc.

    2. the attackers know the limitations and exploit them, moving to parts of the system that are not covered. Rather than spamming channels, they send DM invites with profile pics, for example. Such arms races are inevitable, but matrix can't adapt across the ecosystem nearly as quickly.

    There are good community tools. Matrix itself gets used as transport so that one community's banlists get published to a channel for others to apply.

    Again, though, I'm only reacting to the "nothing comes close for mod tools" aspect. There's not much else around like matrix, for good and bad. And none of it detracts from the rest of the thread.

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  • Third spruce tree on the lefttezoatlipoca@mas.to
    Oct 15, 2026, 3:55 PM

    @mhoye

    I violently agree.

    Even in a closed shop environment, the money/time/effort (which ware all equivalent) you invest in on-boarding new contributors, streamlining the path to their first commit and accolades for following established processes by _following the documentation_ pays huge dividends that vastly outweigh the cost in maintaining all that stuff.

    When I ran things around here, the record for a new just-graduated CS kid to his first ready-to-code-review bugfix PR was _a day_. He read the onboarding material, setup all the repositories and toolchains, self-served from the architecture and "welcome to the shitshow that is our main code repository, read this first to figure your way around" on day 1 and picked, fixed and auto-tested a bug by 10am the next day.

    In his case the motivation was "I want a raise, eventually". In open source, people show up on your doorstep wanting to... begging to help. Make the experience easy and memorable and they'll stick around.

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  • Danny Colindannycolin@floss.social
    Oct 15, 2026, 4:18 PM

    @mhoye And yet, Mozilla (Corporation) leadership doesn't care a bit about investing in fostering a community nowadays. Worse, they continue to put walls and working behind closed doors.

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  • Alex is Canadian nowWizardOfDocs@wandering.shop
    Oct 15, 2026, 8:05 PM

    @mhoye I'm very much looking forward to supporting the new user Mosscap experience. Finally I get to help build a software community I want to be part of. And *nobody* with any pull *anywhere* cares about their new user experience.

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