Hi, I am stepping away from my Flathub-related activities after receiving a series of insulting and belittling remarks from another team member on Matrix, on the night of July 16, 2026.
The rude comments were directed by Bart at me and Hub - another reviewer.
The context is a series of submissions of com.dygma.bazecor
submitted
a few weeks ago. I had not reviewed or touched them but Hub, did. One
of the PRs turned confrontational as the submitter made a rather rude
remark at Hub asking them to find better LLMs to do the reviews.
Subsequently, the submitter was banned by Hub. Shortly after they
probably appealed somewhere as usual and Bart unblocked them, which led
to the third PR at the time of writing.
That one was closed by Hub again as they believed they had blocked the submitter already and was not aware that they were unbanned. When this was exchanged on Matrix in #flathub:matrix.org, Bart made a insulting remark at Hub asking them to “go take a walk”, followed by another insult “I have no energy to keep babysitting you and bbhtt”.
Regardless of what I think about the review comments, there wasn’t enough there, at least in my view, to justify a ban. If I’d been involved in reviewing the submissions, or if Bart had spoken to us before unblocking them, I would have supported lifting the ban and tried to resolve the matter.
Anyways, at the end of the day, I had nothing to do with all 3 of these submissions which can be seen on GitHub. I wasn’t very active this week due to some IRL stuff and I wasn’t on Matrix for the last 6-7 months. Yet I found myself waking up to a ping with a drive-by insult directed at me.
None of us here are “babies” and no one employed Bart to be our legal guardian, so calling it “babysitting” publicly is extremely belittling and insulting to me and more so when I wasn’t even a participant to anything here. I don’t mind random insults thrown at me on the internet but it hurts when it comes from a person whom I respect somewhat.
I sent a message asking to “go easy on the tone and language” but was rebuked yet again and the insult justified because apparently someone somewhere had sent a complaint about me. I am not even sure what specific complaint was this about as no one said anything to me. Even if someone somewhere recieved a complaint, I don’t think insulting other people in public view is the correct response to that. I had to reply in public rather than reaching out privately because the insult at me was already public and thus the damage done. I don’t think privately bringing it up would have done anything to help here.
I lashed out in frustration after that, saying Bart is not the “dictator of Flathub”, to which I got the reply that they “kinda were” and a veiled threat thereafter. In retrospect I probably should have left quietly after sending the first message as things were clear to me by then. I unfortunately did some of the same things I was arguing against but it was from a build-up of frustration and I shall apologise now for that.
However, that comment is factual as Bart has made themselves the self-appointed BDFL of Flathub, publicly mentioning as such when we have neither a verbal agreement, nor a formal policy or a structure appointing anyone in that position. The self-appointed position also leads them to “override” decisions made by other reviewers or team members at will without any discussion - be it public or private and on ocassion merge submissions clearly violating documented policies. This has lead to a number of confrontations over this year, some of which I linked in my earlier blogposts. So the sentiment expressed was as much factual as it was made in the heat of the moment.
The broader source of the frustration beyond the specific events here had been our differing views on AI-generated and low-effort submissions. Hub and I had become increasingly frustrated by them and often blocked repeat offenders. While I still believe many of those actions were justified given how some of these spammers and slop-operators behaved, there were also cases where I think we were too harsh or rude, even by our own standards. Bart, on the other hand, had generally taken a more permissive approach, which I felt was too permissive. That difference in perspective repeatedly led to disagreements over moderation and, ultimately, confrontations. While neither Hub nor me “overrode” each other’s moderation desicions, Bart felt the need to do so on several occassions, without notifying us. This in turn led to more frustration as in many cases, after being unblocked some submitters would continue to spam yet again and so on. People should get the general idea by now. I think if our behaviour was wrong or someone felt a need to reverse our descisions, it could have been done through a discussion first. I don’t recall any such discussions initiated with me other than the times we went confrontational with each other in public view. I’m not sure if I should have tried to initiate something and in retrospect maybe I should have done so but in my defence I wasn’t the one overriding someone else’s desicion.
Anyways, back to recent events. Shortly after the initial messages on July 16, Hub had left the matrix room and expressed the intention to leave Flathub related things in a private Discourse topic made thereafter.
I know I have made mistakes but I believe I tried to amend them as much as possible when I could. But the process has to work both ways because I can’t be receiving insults repeatedly. This wasn’t the first time such language was directed at either of us by Bart publicly. I can tell with full certainty that I had never directed any insult to Bart.
My expectation was that, in the absence of a formal structure, disagreements between us would be discussed before one person’s decision was overridden. At minimum, I believe the person whose action is being reversed deserves a message or a ping beforehand. I have tried to follow this for myself, and I do not recall deliberately overriding another contributor’s decision without first contacting them. At least it doesn’t come to my recent memory.
Those who have access to the private Discourse discussion can see that I apologised for lashing out on Matrix and tried to carve a path forward. I guess it was too late and unfortunately, it turned a into another episode of frustration dump. Also at the time of writing Bart never replied there. So it appears the effort I put to apologise was not reciprocated.
I do not believe I can continue collaborating in this environment. So I stepped away this morning, July 18, removing myself from the GitHub and every other role I could. I was trying to revoke my SSH access myself when funnily enough I noticed that it had already been revoked. I’m not sure what this was about.
Anyway, this brings an end to my 5 year involvement with Flathub and probably close to 10 years for Hub but I can’t speak for them.
Bye.