The entire moderation team resigns, effective immediately. This resignation is done in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves.

As a result of such structural unaccountability, we have been unable to enforce the Rust Code of Conduct to the standards the community expects of us and to the standards we hold ourselves to. To leave under these circumstances deeply pains us, and we apologize to all of those that we have let down. In recognition that we are out of options from the perspective of Rust Governance, we feel as though we have no course remaining to us but to step down and make this statement.

In so doing, we would offer a few suggestions to the community writ large:

  • We suggest that Rust Team Members come to a consensus on a process for oversight over the Core Team. Currently, they are answerable only to themselves, which is a property unique to them in contrast to all other Rust teams.
  • In the interest of not perpetuating unaccountability, we recommend that the replacement for the Mod Team be made by Rust Team Members not on the Core Team.
  • We suggest that the future Mod Team, with advice from Rust Team Members, proactively decide how best to handle and discover unhealthy conflict among Rust Team Members. We suggest that the Mod Team work with the Foundation in obtaining resources for professional mediation.
  • Additionally, while not related to this issue, based on our experience in moderation over the years, we suggest that the future Mod Team take special care to keep the team of a healthy size and diversity, to the extent possible. It is a thankless task, and we did not do our best to recruit new members.

In this message, we have avoided airing specific grievances beyond unaccountability. We've chosen to maintain discretion and confidentiality. We recommend that the broader Rust community and the future Mod Team exercise extreme skepticism of any statements by the Core Team (or members thereof) claiming to illuminate the situation.

We are open to being contacted by Rust Team Members for advice or clarification.

Sincerely,

The Rust Moderation Team (Andre, Andrew and Matthieu)

:desolate:

  • Daireon [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    I thought this was the mod team for Rust the video game lol. I take it the hogs are squealing?

  • MiraculousMM [he/him, any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Can someone give a rundown on the situation here? What's the deal with the Core Team?

      • MiraculousMM [he/him, any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        So to clarify, the moderation team is working for Amazon? Or they've just fallen for Amazon machinations?

        • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Andrew Gallants blog says he's a systems engineer at Salesforce (and makes clear the distinct possibility that he himself is what we'd calla chud), but it's unclear if this Amazon stuff is what's up. Would love to see the core team provide specific reasoning about why their mod team would do this. I distrust at least that the mod team really needed to not explain why they actually left. They should have at least tried to explain the basic impetus for their resignation instead of just saying that the core team is bad.

        • HodgePodge [love/loves]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Probably the last one, but I don’t have time to go digging in their LinkedIns.

      • StellarTabi [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Amazon is supposedly trying to reduce the reputation of the core team so that they can gain membership on it and have some real effect on the direction of the language.

        Obviously this sounds bad, but what's in it for Amazon? Seems like any un-FOSSing amazon could do would be walked around and ignored, but also heavily protested, by the existing huge and established Rust community.

    • companero [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I am wondering if this is related to the struggle in the past involving the core team and Amazon (see this thread; note that Steve is a member of the core team).

  • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    My contribution here is knowing that BurntSushi is Andrew Gallant, an earlier Rust adopter and popularizer. He's written a number of the basic crates, including the Rust regex crate.

    Feels bad man, Rust is a cool language that has a lot of great ideas, it would be a shame if the core development team has chuds and hoggers on it running the show.

    • Quimby [any, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I write all my code in a basic Turing machine. Become ungovernable.

    • thisismyrealname [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      imagine using a language with predefined special syntax instead of simply creating your own

      this post made by Common Lisp Gang

    • pooh [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Knowing nothing about either, what makes crystal better than rust?

      • CrystalGang [comrade/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Crystal lang is like Rust without a borrow checker, and more importantly, without semicolons. The syntax is like Ruby, but performs fast like golang. It's compiled with a garbage collector like golang, but also it's kind of like "what if golang was good?". Unlike ruby, the macros are compile time instead of runtime, also unlike Ruby, the type system is closer to rusts.

        • naom3 [she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          It sounds neat, but it doesn’t seem like a direct alternative to rust. For me, the core feature of rust is the borrow checker and the ownership system, which give you most of the convenience and safety of garbage collection but without any runtime overhead.

          • CrystalGang [comrade/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Of course I don't suggest Crystal for embedded work or non-scripting parts of game engines, but we're on a website written in rust. All the borrow checker does for lemmy is exclude 99% of your backend devs from contributing.

            • layla
              hexagon
              ·
              3 years ago

              All the borrow checker does for lemmy is exclude 99% of your backend devs from contributing.

              A back end written in Crystal would have the same issue but worse. It is far less popular, see e.g. Invidious and how little that has progressed after the lead maintainer quit last year despite being a far more popular project than Lemmy

    • silent_water [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      yes, you should learn the language. this is a governance crisis within the FOSS organization that develops the language - it has little to do with the language as a technology that's useful to know, understand, and use.

  • Lil_Revolitionary [she/her,they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I failed out of my computer science degree, can someone explain what Rust is and what moderators do, possibly what will happen without them?

  • LeninWalksTheWorld [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I don't know anything about this but the core team should have purged these treasonous swine before they could do this. Of course I have no idea what I'm talking about.

  • brainwormfarmer [any,comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    In this message, we have avoided airing specific grievances beyond unaccountability.
    We recommend that the broader Rust community and the future Mod Team exercise extreme skepticism of any statements by the Core Team (or members thereof) claiming to illuminate the situation.

    they want to both protest by quitting
    but also avoid conflict by not stating what is wrong
    that is just leaving it to reactionaries to frame the situation