this is a great first post, and it touches on a lot of things I've struggled with as well.
there's a concerted effort on several fronts to grant fascist interests an unassailable position within community-oriented software projects; that effort is usually backed by powerful corporate interests, as you've already seen with DHH and the takeover of RubyGems. simultaneously with that, and nearer to my own heart, the long-running project to make NixOS and nixpkgs unworkable for anyone but corporate and military interests has gone fully mask-off and started coordinating and talking openly about their plans to make Nix fully a fascist project. I have a longer piece I'll be posting tonight about this situation which I can link if there's interest, but in short: this is a coordinated attack, and it uses methods that have been tried and have succeeded many times. programming communities are being turned into fascist pipelines for many of the same reasons the fascists targeted punk and furry communities, but thanks to being founded on horseshit cyberlibertarian principles and unexamined conservatism masquerading as engineering, our open source and educational communities are uniquely primed for takeover.
for the fascists, of course, any sufficiently isolated community will do. the health of the community and its projects don't matter; the fascists are fine with communities that cannibalize their own and technology that barely works or doesn't work at all. the quality of nixpkgs has dropped sharply since the fascists kicked out the skilled marginalized people keeping the project alive, and every project started by fascists I can think of has been broken and worthless. the fascists don't care: they're here to weaponize a community in both the metaphorical and the very literal senses, and whether or not anything of value is left once they're done is of no concern to them. the isolation works in their favor: it lets them employ all their usual tricks to turn a community on itself. that those tricks were eventually beaten by large parts of the punk and furry communities means there's hope in fighting off these assholes -- but most likely the changes that need to occur will happen in new communities, founded under better principles.
from your post, it seems you've immunized yourself against the game development to fascist pipeline, which is very lucky. you now know what dogwhistles and tricks to expect from most of the fascists you'll run into in programming communities. I saw that Corbin recommended picking up functional programming or a non-Algol-derived language in a sibling comment and from an educational perspective I can recommend that, but unfortunately a lot of functional programming communities tend to be either utterly pro-AI (because they think they're going to inherit Lisp's prestige) or are being pushed towards fascism (look for weirdos who aren't mathematicians obsessing over how pure lambda calculus is and you'll see the red flags) -- if you want a fresh abyss to stare into, search our instance for posts about Urbit if you want to see our efforts at documenting one of the earliest attempts at entryism into functional programming. of course almost any functional language (other than Urbit) will be more rewarding to learn than whichever reactionary Go-but-memory-unsafe language these guys wanted you to learn as an attempt to isolate you further.
while I have no general solutions to what's happening right now, there's a few actions I'm taking that I hope will lead to better things:
- from now on, my software will all be very queer, very political, and utterly poisoned against corporate exploitation.
- while it's not always practical to switch off of these fuckheads' software immediately (our instance still runs on NixOS, great lock-in they've got going), remember how often we've been told that software communities run on advocacy. these fuckheads don't deserve your advocacy or your labor. as far as is practical, give them the opposite. kill the evangelist in your head.
- healthier communities exist, and they're worth our time. they're not large, but you'll meet some of the most gifted people imaginable there -- and all of them most likely have an experience or two similar to yours.
for that last bullet point, I can recommend the better parts of Mastodon -- avoid the tech instances like the plague and focus in on the queer ones with techy users. our instance also has an attempt at a homegrown tech community organized around healthier principles called FreeAssembly, which never quite got off the ground because the fascist takeover of the Nix project happened right after it launched, and then ahaha everything else happened after that, and I never got the chance to kick off that community properly. I still recommend Mastodon because it's established, but if you'd like the same experience as here but in a community more oriented towards posting about personal projects or programming in general, FreeAssembly might be worth a try. I'm finally finishing some of the software I meant to post about way back when we started FreeAssembly, and I'll be writing those up for that community fairly soon.
@mawhrin@awful.systems summarized it nicely but if you want some fresh abyss to stare into, here's some links to fedi posts with details: