A recounting of dansup's hostility
dansup-open-letter.github.io

Sorry if this is off topic, I don’t mean to stir a shitstorm. I just seem to hear barbs about Pixelfed developer dansup’s online behaviour every now and then, but no one ever comes out and make clear what the trouble is.

I guess it’s a legitimate complaint that he holds out on open sourcing projects, and keeps them close to his chest rather than distributing workloads. Given he’s currently developing Pixelfed and Loops and a messenger called Sup, I can understand the worry that he’ll hit a figurative wall and take all projects down with him…

So I found this open letter just now as I were trying to get to the bottom of it, and I genuinely can’t tell if this is what people have been growling about?

The above link is to the “appendix” where the anonymous authors appear to show receipts for the behaviour they flag. In shorter form, from the letter itself:

dansup, the maintainer of Pixelfed, Loops (which NLnet helps fund), and FediDB, among others, is a dangerous force in the fediverse community. With a follower count of over 22 thousand, he has repeatedly shown himself to be hostile to fellow FOSS fediverse developers, have a lack of care for open-sourcing his work, and be in favour of injecting the fediverse with advertisements. He has also proved himself to be prone to conspiratorial thinking, regrettable public statements, and embarrassingly public meltdowns.

Somebody tell me what is going on here?

[edited for typos]

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝AEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    From the top level of this: An open letter to NLnet to pull funding from development of Loops

    Conflict of interest

    This open letter has been authored by contributors who wish to remain anonymous. The authors, as well as some of the undersigned, are friends and acquaintances of hazycora, and as such, we acknowledge any potential conflicts of interest stemming from our relationship.

    I don’t know either party but from the information made public it looks like dansup has acted like a dick and fallen out with hazycora and the drama has escalated hard.

    From what I’ve observed dansup has been going full tilt to get Loops done because of the issues with TikTok and he is not great at delegating or really dealing with people. However, it would be a shame for such vital projects to have their funding cut but, equally, if I was in charge of those grants I’d be worried about dansup burning out and progress stalling. So it should be a requirement that all this is made open source as a priority, with a short to medium term goal being to have these projects run by a group of people to ensure the future and avoid similar issues going forward.