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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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  • 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 very easily find themselves in a room where it's just as easy to talk themselves into the kind of blind spot you can only be trapped in by the atrophy of that humility, from the mere failure to welcome and foster enough diversity and dissent.

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