It’s impossible to tell if the motivation is an honest attempt to
contribute or deliberate destructive trolling. While motivation matters
(why I am writing this wall of text), in result, it doesn’t matter and
is the latter.
I was wondering how I should handle threads like this:
https://forums.whonix.org/t/whonix-and-tails-discussion
I am under no obligation to read everything or to discuss every subject
with everyone until it’s discussed until everyone is happy and agrees.
It’s also not possible time wise as the project grows.
Question to the community:
What do I do? Just ignore, unsubscribe form such forum threads and hope
the community will deal with it?
It takes far less time to can ask more questions and make allegations
than to rebut them. So in a way, makings things dirty is a lot easier
than cleaning up things. So while the usefulness is unclear, at best it
takes away energy and time from the Whonix community and at worst
everyone gives up and questions and allegations remain unchallenged and
a source of FUD.
A huge backlog of analysis isn’t helpful either. Let’s do research,
development and deployment at the Whonix project. But a ton of research
that is theoretic, not well organized and not actionable actually takes
away time from actual progress, development.
The feedback by pano at the moment doesn’t help to move the Whonix
project forward. It’s currently not in a format that is actionable.
Theoretic discussions are old and plentiful online. There are places
where these are welcome and I can understand the mental fun of reading
them and engaging in them. That’s in essence how I got interested in
first security, later anonymity and then started working on Whonix.
In essence, what the Whonix project needs is clear, concise, well
described, actionable tickets on phabricator.whonix.org and people who
implement those.
If pano heavily disagrees, pano is free to move on to other endeavors in
places where pano’s style of discussion is more appreciated. pano is
also welcome to use or not use Whonix as everyone else including raising
any opinion in other places which welcome such (own blog, other forum,
public protest :), …).
Something similar happened with the Tails forum long time ago. In
reaction, the Tails forum was closed. History won’t repeat in Whonix
forums. Whonix’s forums purpose will be limited to Whonix user support
and productive research and development. Won’t be a free speech platform
side project.
Thoughts on by the community are welcome in public or private. Possible
outcomes:
- pano (and similar later accounts) can go on as is, I unsubscribe from
threads and do actual development, community deals with these
discussions if deemed useful - pano (and similar later accounts) gets a warning to slow down (and if
ignored account disabled) - suggestions…?