I had a somewhat active GPL/copylefted project on there for 11 months, but I didn't even see a point in signing up as "community member" to become a part of the registered voting community in order to vote ... because from reading the threads around this it was already an indiscriminate pile-on of moralism and judgement and it was clear where things were going to go from day one.

Any voices that said anything on the PR or on threads about it on Mastodon even ask for clarifications on where the limits etc were intended to be were immediately attacked and shut down in a black and white way... It was very clear where it was going to go and there was zero nuance to the discussion. The "community" shouted out anybody who would have voted against this.

I got ready to pull my project the moment I saw all that going down, and just waited to pull the trigger til the day it passed.

It's their right to narrow their definition of community on this basis. I also think the way they did it is crude, lacks nuance, and was executed poorly.

I'm sure my project probably would not have fallen afoul of their judgements. I hosted my own CI in part because I didn't want to suck up their resources. I was by no means producing "slop" -- I'm a software engineer with a 30 year career and capable of engineering judgement. I'm also long time open source user and contributor, an advocate of copyleft licensing, have my own critical opinions about aspects of LLM usage, and wanted off GH because I saw a lot of ... evil.. there and wanted to not be reliant on American infrastructure among other things.

But... I like probably the majority of authors of large packages these days, use AI tooling as do my contributors. And parts of my project have hooks to use open weight models, and provide MCP etc. hooks, and so on.

Having seen the type of discussion both on the PR and on Mastodon, I felt no desire to have these particular people holding open judgement over me and my project. [Aside: I'm fairly certain someone has gone through the PR that proposed the ban and removed egregious comments ... there are some comments missing that were formerly there, wish I had archived them]

Take the comments on this Mastodon thread: https://wandering.shop/@silvermoon82/116964029691087138 "I'm sorry you caught abuse off the slop fondlers. Consent and boundary issues are inbuilt in their community."

Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 "You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look." "Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."

Comparing AI usage or questions about it to rape culture or violating consent is absolutely repulsive and trivializes the latter and exaggerates the former.

Or making analogies to Claude Code users being NAZIs? "@piggo @tante I see such a rule as being similar to the "no Nazis" rule. It works by Nazi sympathizers self-identifying by arguing about the rule."

Pre-defining an in-group or out-group based on how contaminated they are by the tools they use... I'm sorry, it's ridiculous. And not in the slightest "democratic" even if it holds a formal vote.

It's possible that nuance would prevail when the people sitting in judgement over things happened to look at my project. The actual public blog post seems going out of its way to provide a bit of "don't worry" ... but none of that was provided before. And I felt no need to be under that microscope.

... and so then the flood of "good riddance, so glad we got rid of people like you" comments...

I posted this elsewhere about the kind of un-dialectical purity-of-essence thinking I saw on display:

[I fear] Blunt purity tests administered by people with reductionist and categorical thinking.

The reality is that even tools produced by concentrated capital and mass appropriation can also increase the productive capacity of a small free-software project whose code remains available under copyleft. They're not "infected" and contagious. They're tools.

They can deskill and dispossess workers; they can extend what a particular worker is able to make. Which tendency dominates, under what conditions, and to whose benefit are material questions.

"AI bad" is not an answer to them, any more than tech-bro "innovation good" is.