Okay, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that these two developers, with their decisions in moderating that one instance, have dragged down the reputation of the entire platform. They’re asking for donations because they lost the donations they were already getting.

And instead of questioning why that is and addressing it, they’re asking for more.

This doesn’t inspire trust in them. I trust their ideology not to mess with the platform, what I don’t trust is their competence if they can’t stop hemorrhaging donation money by refusing to deal with the biggest wart on the platform. They have all of these people saying they would donate if they would just deal with this conflict, but they won’t. How badly do they need the money to keep developing if they’re not willing to separate?

Here’s the better question: do they even want to keep developing if they had to separate from it?

More importantly, just from a straight development perspective, this whole operation is a way too flimsy if it’s depending on these two people, alone, forever. There have been a lot of really clumsy mistakes and lack of best practices.

What happens if they finally get another developer that really knows Rust and wants to join the project but doesn’t “fit in”? How are they actually going to expand the team so this project can grow and not be so dependent on them when they have the reputation they do?

If the community were going to fork it, they would have forked it by now. I don’t think there are enough people around that can manage a fork of this platform as it exists, so we are tied to them. And I don’t think I like that. I would like to see this platform expand beyond them, but the current course doesn’t seem to indicate that will ever happen.

Alternatives are not even close in quality.

Yes and we can go donate to those alternatives instead and help build them up.

Completely divorced of their political views, I don’t think I want to donate to them simply because I don’t believe they’re doing a good job managing the platform. Donations aren’t just down, they lost those donations. And when confronted with this fact, and told that they should probably change some things if they want to keep getting donations, they’ve staunchly refused.

This does not inspire faith in the development team.

Meanwhile let me seems to be too guarded or too complicated for anybody else to join the team and assist. It’s still just these two. If the platform is growing, it cannot just be these two.

Freeloading where? They can be donating to the instance they are on.

It is not impossible, it’s just difficult. You do not have to keep everyone satisfied, only enough of them. All you’re doing here is making arguments for why they shouldn’t change because they will never get 100% approval rating. That’s just idiotic. No one is expecting perfect, they just expect better.

More importantly, neutrality in moderation is generally seen as more acceptable than swinging fully towards one direction. People will complain that you are allowing x or y, but you get much further by permitting that balance to exist naturally and moderating it at its most extremes, then you do buy stamping out one and promoting the other, which is absolutely what they do on .ml

Whoever said that you had to be a free speech absolutist, either? You can believe in free speech and also not be okay with Nazis on your platform.

It’s really not that hard, many internet forums have been doing this for decades. It’s kind of telling, frankly, how the very notion of it seems to elude some people around here.

All of which ignores the point the top comment made: that they shouldn’t be moderating at all. Let whoever they choose moderate that instance, and separate from it entirely. Focus only on development.

But the fact they’re apparently more concerned about the content on that instance than getting donations to support development of the platform is very telling, too.

Also, if they can’t make enough money in donations to keep doing this full-time, why don’t they let other people into the project on a volunteer basis? Reduce the workload on themselves so they can get part time jobs or something. All I’ve heard is how controlling they are, but it feels like this is too big of a thing to be on two individual developers in the first place.

If more people than just them could be involved, I’d happily donate. I would like to donate to something that’s going to grow and get better over time, not to two individual developers treading water. I get it’s difficult to find people that know Rust, and I sympathize, but my point stands. This entire project is operating very precariously on two individuals and if it’s going to grow, that has to change at some point.

And as Arotrios said in another comment, the reason they’re asking for money is because they lost the money they were getting. The way they operate, and allow that instance to destroy the reputation of their project, is what led to this. And it will continue to lead to this, unless they do some radical changes. I’m not putting my money back in until I see them doing something different and showing they’ve learned the lesson.

Why should people “Avoid at all costs” a manufacturer that will let you unlock the device with a code? I’ve never had a problem getting an unlock code from Motorola, and once it’s unlocked, it’s unlocked.

Why is this only including Play Store games and not F-Droid?

Because far and away the free, no Ads, no IAP Android game I’ve gotten the most use out of is Unciv.

Not to mention its birth. It’s the best example I can think of for how open source is supposed to work: it started as Emby, the Emby devs tried to close it off for profit, and the community fork became Jellyfin, which I’d argue has more than outgrown Emby.

You barely even hear about it anymore, it’s only ever Plex or Jellyfin.

Because what you consider a fact is based on studies that don’t provide as compelling evidence as you want to believe they do.

Generally speaking, it’s probably best to not do it, but calling it outright abuse requires evidence that it is causing actual harm, and the scientific consensus on it is not as solid as you think it is.

Recent academic review of many past studies have found that it’s inconclusive.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9860667/

Basically, we need more studies before we can start deleting shit on accusations of animal abuse.

Only issue with alternativeto is the comments and reviews are all dated, some by over 10 years, and often don’t reflect the current state of the software.

A lot of the information on the site just feels very stale in general.