I'm sure the Mastodon complainers will build a much better browser!

Since it was brought up, can you, or someone else summarize what happened?

I am not looking for drama on Mastodon (it seems I need an account to search?), or drama here. Just some facts to judge whether this is a red flag of some kind, worth investigating more.

There was a PR to change references of he to they, or similar thinking the writing was by a non-native English speaker. The PR was aimed at inclusivity. The response was that politics are not welcome there.

A legit seeming concern is that anything can be political in the eyes of the lead dev. Is support for screen readers part of a political agenda?

In an effort to avoid drama, drama was invited. This doesn’t seem likely to be a welcoming place for some that would otherwise contribute.

Except screen reader support is an actual usability concern.

> The response was that politics are not welcome there.

This is the ultimate response. Huge respect to the lead dev.

And this is very political. "They" is plural, it's usage in singular form is fringe, only very recent and originates from within political activism. For the majority of English speakers this is incorrect, and will remain incorrect as the belief system associated with it's usage is fundementally wrong and incompatible with their world view.

This is false, singular they existed since the 14th century, says right on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

they is inclusive and can refer to a singular unknown binary gender or to someone who is nonbinary. language is fluid... it changes.

The dev responds:

“I have absolutely nothing against gender neutral language. I am however against outsiders doing drive-by PRs with ideological motivations. If a regular contributor hade made these edits, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Could I have communicated this better in 2021? You bet.”

— <https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1808294414101467564>

Here’s one I found: <https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5823666/ladybird-web-browser...>

Seems like the project quickly shut the annoying troublemakers down. The few people on Mastodon that are upset about this don't matter and they'll quickly move on to being upset about some other trivial matter.

Their opinions on this subject may not matter (to most), but I think it’s problematic to say people don’t matter.

Why are you trying to bring drama in here? Please delete this.

> if you go searching for ladybird on Mastodon you will find that there’s quite a bit of ill will

I followed your suggestion and took a look at this.

Let's call the situation what it is: Someone with a few followers on Mastodon saw a reason to harass an individual, with the reason itself being secondary in nature. What happened there is called brigading, which is rightfully a bannable offense in many moderated online communities, even those many would (rightfully) consider very toxic in nature.

Pretending that this 3 year old pull request with a one (!) word change was actually of deep interest to the people involved seems pretty dishonest.

The fact that this absolutely trivial PR is enough to gain so much traction in certain circles that they gather to sling hurtful tirades at someone and call them names in order to hurt them....why would anyone want such a community interacting with a project?

Why would anyone want such a toxic crowd near a project?