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, 2027.
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 in any way but
Hub, did. One of the PRs turned a bit confrontational
as the submitter made a rather rude remark at Hub. Subsequently,
the submitter was banned by Hub. Shortly after they probably appealed
somewhere and Bart unblocked them, which led to the third PR at
the time of writing.
That one 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”.
I had nothing to do with all 3 of these submissions as can be seen on GitHub. I wasn’t even on Matrix for 6-7 months, yet I found myself waking up to a ping with an 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 insulting to me and more so when I wasn’t even a participant to anything here.
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.
In frustration I lashed out a bit saying Bart is not the “dictator of Flathub”, to which I got the reply that they “kinda” were and a threat thereafter.
That comment is factual as Bart has made themselves the self-appointed BDFL of Flathub, publicly mentioning as such when we have neither a formal policy appointing anyone in that position nor a formal structure.
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. 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. Shortly after Hub 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 and I believe I tried to amend them as much as possible when I could. 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.
My expectation was that, in the absence of a formal governance structure, disagreements between team members would be discussed before one person’s decision was overridden. At a minimum, I believe the person whose action is being reversed deserves a message or a ping beforehand. I have tried to follow that standard 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 find a carve path forward. Unfortunately, Bart never replied there and it appears that effort 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 also noticed that my SSH access had already been revoked. I do not know whether this was related to the events here or to something else. If it was the former, I believe it further illustrates that someone is “power-tripping” their way through.
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.