Hyprland is a toxic community
Hyprland is an open source Wayland compositor based on wlroots, a project I started back in 2017 to make it easier to build good Wayland compositors. It’s a project which is loved by its users for its emphasis on customization and “eye candy” – beautiful graphics and animations, each configuration tailored to the unique look and feel imagined by the user who creates it. It’s a very exciting project!
Unfortunately, the effect is spoilt by an incredibly toxic and hateful community. I cannot recommend Hyprland to anyone who is not prepared to steer well clear of its community spaces. Imagine a high school boys' locker room come to life on Discord and GitHub and you’ll get an idea of what it’s like.
I empathise with Vaxry. I remember being young, smart, productive… and mean. I did some cool stuff, but I deeply regret the way I treated people. It wasn’t really my fault – I was a product of my environment – but it was my responsibility. Today, I’m proud to have built many welcoming communities, where people are rewarded for their involvement, rather than coming away from their experience hurt. What motivates us to build and give away free software if not bringing joy to ourselves and others? Can we be proud of a community which brings more suffering into the world?
As someone on HackerNews said:
Hmmm. If abuse happens, is the right idea to say that “I don’t need this community”?
I’m not sure how that HackerNews comment helps in the slightest. If my university has an obscure basket weaving community and people are getting abused in that community, should I just say “Eh we don’t actually need a basket weaving community”.
It’s also amusing to me that a commenter on a relatively obscure and niche website is complaining that that don’t need (or care about abuse that transpired on) a niche community from another website. And then this comment is echoed in yet another niche community.
"You shouldn't use this window manager because their community is toxic"
"I'm not going to interact with the community"
Seems fair enough
For real. Not everything needs to be a fucking subculture. Next they'll be saying, "The WinRAR community is toxic". Like no, your discord server is poorly moderated. The problem starts and ends there.
I just wanted to point out that it's ridiculous to form some kind religion¹ around a wayland compositor.
Also, I don't want anybody to think I'm supporting what's happening there. I just don't really care about Hyprland's community because I'm not part of it.
¹Hyprland's discord server is named "Church of Hyprland"
This is a pretty old joke. See "Church of Emacs".
Another toxic community founded and maintained by the socially inept. Yep, checks out.
Hmm, I feel like there's some nuances around Hyprland (and it's kind of window managers) that makes having a place for discussion valuable.
I'm not a hyprland user, but I find it valuable to lurk around SwayWM communities on Discord and Reddit.
Yeah.
At maximum a bug/issue tracker is needed.
That's great for you but that might not be true for someone you recommend it to, or decides to give it a try after you mention you use it. Someone might go looking for help or tips there.
File a bug, read FAQ, StackOverflow? If you are messing around with window managers on Linux, a certain level of competency is expected. However, I'm more concerned about the weirdos hanging around in a discord chat of said window manager, harassing strangers. Such a strange hobby.
Damn I didn't know women didn't exist on the internet! Also "making a big deal out of ones pronouns" is almost never the case, it's always just a normal request for the respect of addressing someone properly.
Unclear if you're referring to the meme or if serious, so I'm gonna leave this here just in case: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet
given I am a woman who is currently on the internet, I am aware there are women on the internet.
thanks for explaining that for me 😉
LIES!
YWNBAW
Does drew not know about the existence of singular they? I use that unless i know their gender properly
These are not Drew's words, he is quoting something said by the project dev. The context that the previous commenter ommitted is:
I use y’all also, it’s can be singular or plural in practice
Well, apparently those moderators care. Why else edit it?
They like to make a show like everyone on Earth is just like they are so how dare we exist differently but it's clearly just them being hateful. Idunno how bigots manage to still think they're clever and totally not insecure whilst making self-contradictory statements and raging over nonsense and trivia for hours at a time, often in spaces where they're not even welcome.
I can personally vouch for how toxic the Discord server and its moderators/admins are. Went there for support (Hyprland was crashing on startup on AMD, sway worked fine), and was told something along the lines of "if you can't figure this out you're stupid and you should stop using Linux". Figured out the issue on my own and stopped using and recommending Hyprland after that.
Vaxry's themselves does this all the time. He's an asshole. Like I get OSS developers don't owe anyone anything, but some people think that means they can be an asshole to their users for no reason too.
Just look at this for example. Someone asked a clarifying question and Vaxry basically said "stop making noise". Ironically producing more noise instead of just, idk, answering them? https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/1817
Sorry to be dragging a comment out of the aether as I read into Hyprland controversies, but its absolutely wild this guy was rude across the span of an entire week about a pretty typical issue request, and then later down the road was like "it was one bad comment I might have been having a bad day" and its like... Dude it was 7 days
I empathize a lot with this comment.
In tech (though I would guess as in many other technical domains), many people do seem to easily bully people for not knowing things or making mistakes. I'm guessing it's just people having high insecurities themselves, it's even more of an ego thing when considering that computer things are considered as a "nerd" pastime (a group considering itself "smart"). Not knowing things - even things that we would have thought are really simple - should be OK on an help channel as long as you're not abusing the helpers' patience.
I've been a witness of these situation countless times, the sane way of handling this for me have been to just consider that these are mostly people externalizing their poor self esteem and to just continue conversation (at worst with the other people) as normal.
I wonder if this comes from the only help / discussion being on Discord which has an infamously horrible search feature.
A forum could even be indexed by search engines so no need for:
this guy just learned about discord general chats lol
they're all this bad, and also they're absolutely dogshit for open source software so I have no idea why people make them
I'm in the max server limit, 100 right now, and many of those are people who treat discord as github, which is so annoying (but many projects are of questionable legality, like Dan's palace which makes and distributes completed android and vita ports of other games for free).
One time I got excited since there was announcement for the half life 2 android source port discord. I thought it was a big update or maybe a new game, but what I saw was something like:
It's just discord that has these issues. Matrix or IRC don't have these problems. Discord just creates a kind of culture that fosters this stuff.
yeah it really attracts the young gamer crowd, not exactly for serious discussion
This. I'm tired of all short responses that don't want to discuss the problem or steer the topics to a direction.
Nope it's all over matrix as well.
I haven't encountered any of these issue on matrix, but admittedly I haven't joined a lot of matrix chats.
I was/am a mod for a LGBT room. I had to take a break it's gotten so bad lately.
If your discord general chat looks like this you are in the wrong discord
You frontin like there's any better quality chat then that
All this over some discord server drama. I cant blame the dev for wanting to code and not waste his time moderating.
Then don't run a discord instance?
"Hey, the server is getting pretty toxic and I can't be bothered moderating it - this is no longer an official communication channel, I'm not going to be hanging out here anymore, if you need help ask in the GitHub discussion forum"
That douchebag can't even moderate himself. I wasn't considering trying out hyprland, but after this I wouldn't feel safe running his code on any of my computers. I can imagine that it would do some "prank" if it found out that I'm thinking differently
It's the developer's responsibility to moderate the discord server properly.
It's the moderation staff's responsibility. Sorry for nitpicking, I understand in this case it's likely the same people.
I just get triggered when I hear that an open source software developer should have any responsibilities at all (maybe apart from some extreme examples), and I wouldn't like this idea to stick in anyone's head.
He doesn't have the responsibility to open a discord server for his project, absolutely agree.
But if you open a server, you do in fact have to moderate it.
I agree, open source devs don't owe anyone anything (unless they're accepting commissions or something). Also, generally speaking, being a good developer does not translate to being a good community moderator. There should be no expectation of the latter.
The developer owes you nothing.
The developer doesn't owe us anything, but if they're creating an online community like Discord there are inherent responsibilities that come with that. If they don't want to moderate, then they shouldn't create a Discord/Matrix/Whatever server.
Just like how even if the developer doesn't owe us anything, that doesn't mean it's fine for them to push malware as an update to their previously fine code after they've established trust.
"server"
That's what they're called over there, yes.
The guy who develops hyprland is a known transphobe, I'm surprised this is just now coming out.
That usually isn't a problem as long as they keep it to themselves and away from the community. There are many Foss developers who are like that - they don't cause a controversy. This one seems to be different and openly toxic.
I stopped using it because of a couple shitty interactions on Discord. I don't know anything about the developer himself but the company he keeps sucks. Using the word "cucked" when talking about breaks in dependencies... and being told "see if I care" when pointing out a race condition I found in initialization that caused problems with multimonitor setups.
No thanks. Sway works great. No need for eye candy.
Hyprland dev's response to blog post: https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandsCommunity
What a tone-deaf response, yikes.
Yeahhh, he's like "everything was taken out of context to smear me", he shows the context and it doesn't make him look any better.
It's a shame bc I really wanted to get into hyprland, but I won't get involved with a project that is okay harassing people for being trans.
His response is perfectly rational. You need to stop getting offended over every small thing on the internet.
treating people respectfully is not getting offended. please touch some grass and open your eyes.
The internet is not your daycare you retarded faggot
Maybe you're right. Being "daycared" shouldn't happen on the internet, it should be a prerequisite.
People who default to stringing multiple slurs together for a response just to prove a point should just be banned on sight and sent back to daycare. Maybe they could learn something.
Did you read his response? These were a few small incidents blown out of proportion. Maybe grow a thicker skin?
that's not really the point considering this didn't occur in a vacuum. this one event can come to just be a grift and what I said will still be true.
I only have two things to say:
Interacting with people without harassment is hardly "politics".
The final bit is interesting. Vaxry says Q (who was openly bigoted) got punished, but doesn't mention prisj (who was slightly less open about it).
And if you really need a place with controversial jokes, split it off from your support server or something.
Your first mistake was joining a Discord group for a software product. Github pages / bug-tracker or GTFO.
Fucking right? Let alone a open source project.
Just dont interact with the community. Theres an excelent wiki that details everything.
It sucks that cool projects like hyprland are usually riddled with toxic weirdos that ruin it. It also sucks that there's not much to choose in the wayland space that's usable and actively developed but I refuse to use hyprland after seeing this.
Well that's pretty bad. I just switched to hyprland and like it, but I don't want to give those people a bigger platform than what they already have... Ah shit I'll have to think about that. Why can't we have nice things that aren't made by complete assholes.
From Vaxry's response:
Sir, what do you think a BLOG is for?
I just switched to hyprland and although the discord general chat isn't for everyone, they have been helpful when I ask stupid questions and need a little help.
Wow, this looks awesome!
Does not anymore
CW: slurs, bigotry
Well this was apparently their chat log. I found the link through the comments on Hacker News. Whatever you think of Drew, he's not wrong at all, they sound like they just discovered 4chan.
Riiight.
You kinda left out the next line in which he says
That’s the whole statement and tbh I agree. It’s never anyone’s fault for being a bad person, but it is 100% their responsibility to right their wrongs.
I didn't kinda leave it out, I just left it out
The very next words are "but it was my responsibility"... what exactly is bad about that statement if you don't intentionally cherry pick a bad quote?
It was his fault too imo
Yeah, I'm not too fond of that statement. I respect ddevault, particularly since I have seen his serious growth into a mature, empathetic person. So ICM surprised that this made it into the post.
Take every opinion from Drew DeVault with a grain of salt.
Mom, people on the internet are being mean again
This is a good enough reason to fork a project and establish a new community with new norms.
I mean if he is the lead dev, then I doubt this makes much sense.
Hyprland is itself a fork of wlroots, a project that the author of this post created, so this has happened before and they definitely have the skills to bootstrap a new project.
It's not a fork of wlroots. wlroots is a library to assist developers in creating Wayland compositors.
Yeah my mistake. Thanks for the correction.
No, it is not. wlroots is plumbing containing parts a compositor commonly would need to implement, and many compositors - including hyprland - sit on top of that to avoid reinventing the wheel over and over again.
Ah yeah I had it wrong. Thanks for the correction.
People like you are insane
Fork this project for what? For hecking misgendering your sisters? Go fuck off to your safespaces and stop bring your cancer to free software.
Just mass-report the Discord server I guess.
>let me and my cult report this server because a person didn't use muh pronouns and hecking misgendered me
Kill yourself
Well, we live in a democracy: 9 out of 10 people enjoy bullying or don't care about it. If you hate democracy, go to North Korea, snowflake!
(obvious /s is obvious)
In other non-news: Using a software doesn't require visiting a loosely associated unofficial community. This has strong vibes of people wanting to be Christian and changing Christianity while being opposed to ~half the bible's content if they bothered to read it. Just fuck that cesspool and move on with your life ...
It is not obvious. Look at the comments, there are weird people here too.
Who gives a fucking shit lol. Guy makes software I like, I use it. I don't care if he has slaves on treadmill generating his electricity.
Offensive, but funny
I struggle to be interested in any bling project written by C++ "coders" since they were 9 who don't even know how copyright works so use a pseudonym there instead - they're almost always inexperienced children. And children are almost always sociopaths.
Is Hyprland violating someone's copyright?
Lgbt and it's consequences are a disaster to humanity
Also daily reminder that you will never be a woman
Incorrect, from wikipedia:
Aka: Trans women may have been born with the body of a man, but they were born with the brain of a woman.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruence#:~:text=The%20available%20research%20indicates%20that,in%20non%2Ddimorphic%20brain%20areas.
Don't feed the trolls, report & block them.
Edit: Ahh, the joy of running your own instance :)
Can you please explain what you mean by the edit?
Because I run my own lemmy instance, I can ban users from it. Effectively it's exactly the same as blocking them (their posts won't ever reach me), but it does feel slightly better.