“Words aren’t dangerous” is one of the greatest misnomers of all time. Words have, repeatedly throughout human history, demonstrably been the catalyst for action.
Normalizing hate speech is a signal that hate itself can be normal. Hate speech has become violence so many times that I can not fathom not understanding that words have real power.
Regarding who may be making the problem worse, I’ll let a better spoken man field a response: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
First off: hate and spam aren’t mutually exclusive, it can be both. Especially when, after reading the linked article, it’s pretty clear that this isn’t an isolated case of one email going out.
But more importantly: hate is never a non-issue; you may not have been bothered but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an impact on other’s lives. Tolerating hate is so very dangerously close to acceptance here and we as a society simply can’t allow that to become normal.
Codeberg taking the time to tell us that this was wrong and they don’t tolerate their systems being used to spread hate is good.
All good reasons to make a decision, I’m not trying to sway anyone in a direction.
I just feel bad when people see drama in a community and wonder if that thing is “safe”. I’ve seen this kind of thing many times before in other communities—PERL, Python, Ruby, Rust, etc—and it never seems to lead to sweeping changes the normal user would notice. It’s pretty safe to assume that day-to-day users of thing can just carry on if they don’t care about the community upset.
It’s probably wise to simply ignore the drama. Open source seems to invite this at the “top” for whatever reason, but for the casual user there is usually little to no impact.
Unless you’re trying to be a top contributor to nix, I would just carry on with normal usage and all the current drama will blow over.
That… that is the punchline. It being the same punchline is the punchline of this joke. It’s commentary as humor.