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Comment by eggbrain

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Comment by eggbrain

This post does not feel like it was made in good faith. The general premise ends up being:

- Matz is nice -> DHH / Tobias are "not nice" -> Ruby is doomed (because of two not nice people, also perhaps because of AI)

I think if they had focused perhaps on DHH (DHH's writings have been very polarizing), and also dropped the AI bit at the end, they might have had a stronger point, but Tobias ends up being judged guilty by the author almost purely through association:

> [...] Lütke doesn’t say anything nearly as incendiary as DHH, but the actions of the company he controls tell their own story, and his posts on X, the Everything App, document his turn to the right, along with all the crypto and AI stuff you’d expect to go along with it.

The author ends with a hope that a fork of rails will happen, quoting a user on mastodon:

> [...] we're building a community to execute a bigotry-free #Rails fork [...]

Here's my issue: let's imagine the author gets exactly what they want. Rails is forked, the fork becomes more used than rails, the community is saved!

The problem is that this forked code now becomes two things: a product of software (what it was before), and a product of ideology.

When a piece of software now also represents an ideology, people that want to contribute (but are not coders) end up contributing to the ideology instead. E.g. in this case, they'll try to help define what constitutes a bigot, find potential bigots in the community to root them out, things of that nature. When the "easy" bigots are found and removed, the work does not stop -- the definition of what is a bigot changes, and new bigots are found.

To be clear, the above happens regardless of ideology -- it's just human nature (See: Levari et al., Science, 2018). For example, many people on Reddit who claimed it had gotten too left-wing/right wing tried to create their own social media platform, only to realize that targeting an ideology as their main differentiator ended up eventually only attracting the people who are so deep in that ideology that it pushed away anyone casual.

Replies eggbrain · 2026-07-29
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