@chandlerc Hmmm. I don't hear you as factoring in the human experience of being in community and being ostracized from it. I think that fear, and the pain of it happening, goes fairly deep. I'm not sure if factoring it in would change your reasoning much, but I wouldn't leave it out of your thinking. At a minimum, I think people will still react very strongly negatively to the threat of ostracization, possibly even more so than the thread of criminal prosecution.

Having said that, I totally see the reluctance to ostracize as being weaponized by bad actors. And I have appreciated the culture on Bluesky of "Don't engage, just block", which is basically ostracization, if of a much smaller kind than blocking someone from an open source community.

@curiouserrandy I feel like I tried to directly address that fear:

"""
That's not to say that either of these is an inconsequential event -- they can be very consequential. And so folks I think feel motivated to push them to the higher standard.
"""

And in _this_ post, I'm not trying to address this fear being weaponized (agree it is, and that's a big problem, just not for this post).

All I'm trying to highlight that the standard we reach for to address this fear shouldn't be the _same_ standard that we use for state-backed "ostracization" of incarceration and physical violence. The standard that is used there is probably not well optimized for addressing the real, but categorically lower, risks of ostracization from an OSS community or collection of work colleagues.

And when we *do* reach for that higher standard, it gives IMO a very damaging impression of conflating these two risks as of a similar magnitude. But banning you from an online space is very different from physical assault, hand cuffing, and incarceration. =/

@chandlerc No argument with any of what you say. And I solidly agree with your basic point, that the standards that are appropriate in the legal world, that are backed by the state monopoly on violence, aren't the right standards for how to manage ostracization in other communities.

But my gut is that the consequences are different in type, not, or not just, in degree. And that feels like it needs to be incorporated as well. Fines and incarceration by the legal system may not alienate you from your community (there's at least one case in my community were it emphatically hasn't), and I believe we're hard wired to be concerned about our relationship with our communities in a different way than our freedom and finances.

@curiouserrandy

Yeah, there is a type difference....

But I think I've skipped over another aspect. The rules and processes of state-backed laws and such are also optimized _for the most extreme_ versions of the state-monopoly on violence. We don't really have a legal system well tuned to handling fines and such. Don't get me started on how we respond to property damage or theft .... It's pretty nonsensical all around.

But if you look at _dramatically_ violent responses enabled by laws like life-long incarceration in a way untethered to human rights and dignity.... all of a sudden, many aspects of the process make more sense. (Not all of them, but some. And more in their ideas than the practical realities. There is a long critique of legal systems that is warranted but off topic here.)

The result is that the structures and approach to establishing culpability are skewed somewhat wildly toward enabling .... rather extreme forms of reprisal, that I think also preclude a complete inversion due to the perception differences of the different types of response.

And my whole point here is to encourage communities is to avoid reaching for these excessively strong and ultimately self-defeating standards of operating when setting up things like moderation. Instead, embrace a more practical, simple, and judgement-call oriented approach. Because the stakes, while high, are worlds different from the stakes that legalistic mechanisms optimize for: literally violent destruction of every aspect of your life.