Social media is virtual town hall and a place for many to vent and deal with their emotions - not everybody is perfect and uses the internet the way you approve of. It’s truly no different in essence than the LKML or other public-facing communication platforms - it just has more voices and more free engagement. We can be big people who express ourselves any way we’d like as long as we respect others the way we’d like to be respected.

I don’t advocate for shaming because I wouldn’t want it done to me, but what transpired is not “bad faith”, and it’s questionably hostile because Hector clearly wavered in their approach. They are under a lot of stress and are obviously motivated by the feelings of the other R4L maintainers and their issues - their good faith and empathy is plain to see. They are very upset that others are being disrespected, that their work is being unnecessarily questioned, and that their efforts overall are likened to a “cancer”.

Did Hector disrespect the maintainer in question? Did Hector call people to action in order to shame the maintainer in question? Their initial intention did matter, of course, and I was not able to read the drama in question on social media because it appears to be removed. Hector certainly wanted the maintainer removed, which I don’t personally agree is ideal or fair, but it’s not their decision and it’s not social media’s decision.

On the flip-side in this instance, I similarly see somebody who brings up valid issues with splitting the codebase accompanied by a lot of emotions spilling out (like seeing Rust as a cancer, and essentially vowing to stop it from spreading in the codebase further), but I personally fail to see how that is their problem if the code isn’t going to involve them. It’s up to the Linus and the larger community to discuss the form in which Rust will take in the Linux kernel. Clearly a discussion that could be had with Hector, but there is a lot of hostility towards public focus coming from Linus, and he effectively shut the discussion down.