It looks like someone who has an axe to grind and is picking apart everything that the Debian team do and showing it in the worst possible light, in a conspiratorial finger-poking style.

Are there actually threats on there? Corruption, threats and blackmail seem to be the site’s main allegations, so I wouldn’t expect it to contain threats as that’d be hypocritical.

Yes there are, but I think the worst are political types who thrive in the shadows, hiding behind good decorum. I think the current climate of feigning offence tunes technical organisations so that the best manipulators of people rise to the top rather than the best technologists. But that might be my own personal bias speaking.

But I think I found one of the websites they’re talking about. https://debian.community/ - it seems to be filled with hit pieces against the Debian team, accusing them of all sorts of ills.

I ran it for a bit a few years ago when I had very bad internet on holiday - I could never get it working. It hogged all my battery for ages and couldn’t send a message to my gf who was right next to me.

IMO the way for mesh messaging tech to gain a foothold is by being useful when there’s a bunch of people in a location where there’s no internet, so they should be targeted at those people first:

• Holiday destinations where people are charged for WiFi and the mobile network is either under heavy pressure or not available (campsites, cruise ships, holidays where roaming charges hurt)
• Hiking, where people have intermittent internet but other people are sometimes in range for relaying messages
• Music festivals, where huge numbers of people gathered in one place overload the network.
• Nightclubs and warehouse parties where you’re in a metal box with no signal unless you go for a smoke
• A device that doesn’t have a network subscription, like tablets, but wants to get messages while away from WiFi networks

Then build a public mesh that has utility, not this crazy one-hop fundamentalism but something that actually works.

How come? It all seems very vague. Was it this?

https://danielpocock.com/debian-debconf-diversity-harassment-abuse-expulsion/

Edit:

Also it seems very weasely for a person to make accusations (I assume this was posted by an individual), without any links to back it up, anonymously via an official press release.

This sort of thing doesn’t sit right with me, and makes me lose faith in Debian as an organisation.

Is there not a Docker image for this? It usually takes all the pain out of this sort of thing, otherwise you’ve got a server that’s a pet when you should be treating them like cattle.