Wordpress got to where it is on the backs of volunteer devs and sysadmins (like me!)

Wikipedia got to where it is on the backs of volunteer devs and editors (like me!)

Neither would exist without a huge community of volunteer support.

And now both are looking at their audience and community and users and the people who depend on them and saying "fuck you."

We have every right to demand better, they broke the social contract.

"We volunteer for you, because you're creating a public good" became "This good is too public"

more seriously: if we want to have heritage software, we need to kill the Great Man theory of software development.

if you’ve invented something and you want it to outlive you (and you should), you need to do the work to figure out how to empower the most marginalized parts of your community to take over for you, and you need to have that in place way before you reach burnout, die, or yield your cognition to a slop machine.

if you don’t know which parts of your community are marginalized and can be trusted with maintainership, that’s a problem you should fix.

I’m still sneering hard at the idea that rsync of all things has a discord, but it is fucking wild that it has a discord and tridge is still effectively the only voice in how rsync should be maintained.

Learning about how early Chinese immigrants in California and Oregon were viciously attacked up and down the west coast, massacred, had their things taken, prevented from walking on the streets after sunset in nearby Antioch, prevented from buying property in many parts of the north and east bay, told they were diseased people who didn’t deserve the same rights as Europeans, even in death, helped me see that we think we live in a better, more enlightened time but we don’t.

It’s also taught me that I deserve to be here, and that I have more in common with a new immigrant family from Fuzhou or Taishan who still lives in a 8-to-one-room-in-Chinatown environment today, even if I have had many other privileges in comparison.

Without Wong Kim Ark, there would have been no birthright citizenship.