So: “a few months ago, the Ubuntu Forums community merged with our Discourse community after being apart for quite a long time. During the merger, we simply adopted the Forums posting guidelines without a thorough review by the Community Council. We didn’t spot that the Forum had a stricter policy on politics and explicitly disallowed flags. Adding to that issue was a generational difference in the meaning of “queer”, and whether or not it’s still considered a slur.”
Okay.
As a queer trans woman, I’m glad I switched to Fedora.
At least they are admitting it was wrong instead of doubling down
Debian is basically Ubuntu without Snap.
You can switch. Just sayin.
Good to know. I hate snap anyway
last time i reformatted was in the pandemic. dunno when next time is gonna be, but it’s definetly gonna debian or fedora instead of ubuntu.
Official response of the Discourse moderators: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/on-discourse-rules-about-politics/66986
The mods say that the mistake was in the misinterpretation of “queer” as a slur (because it used to be a slur), but they also mention that they privately discussed with the new user to convince them to remove a trans flag from the profile… and the mods didn’t really explain in the response why this happened…?
As always, read the response to make your own judgement.
The original content was restored and a comment made by a mod underneath the profile page of the guy says this :
The original text of this topic has been restored. The moderator action was a mistake and not reflective of the Ubuntu Diversity Policy 6.
As stated within the policy “…we explicitly honour diversity in age, culture, ethnicity, genotype, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, neurotype, phenotype, political beliefs, profession, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, subculture and technical ability.” The Ubuntu community is for everyone.
reads like a stereotypically canned HR message.
What wording would you have them use?
did you respond to the wrong comment?
Chat, please write an apology that clarifies Diversity Policy 15 and assures the reader that as a company we are not homophobic. Please use a professional, courteous tone and limit the response to 500 characters or less.
That’s a great idea! Here’s an apology that clarifies Diversity Policy 15, assuring the reader that the company is not homophobic, using a professional, courteous tone, limited to 500 characters or less:
We’d like to apologize for the incident. According to Diversity Policy 15, [company name] does not discriminate based on sexuality — this incident waInternal Error
Good
'Politics: This topic has caused serious problems in the past and as such is subject to tight control. Discussion of the politics of open source it permissible in the lounge.
Ah yes, the 2 sexualities: Straight and political
This is the thing that makes me as angry as I am right now. This is exactly what they are doing.
Thanks! I’m going to reuse this.
It seems for the last 5 years or so, Ubuntu has done a good job of making everyone hate them.
I think historically Canonical has always been a bit or a weird company. I ended up ditching Ubuntu because they seem to have this weird penchant for picking some new shiny feature (Unity, the convergent Desktop/Phone OS thing, Mir, currently Snaps) and just going all-in on it whether people want it or not, working on it until it’s almost good, then ditching it for the next shiny thing.
Also their hiring process is apparently bonkers.
Upstart was the one that made me ditch it back in the day. I came back when they embraced the more sensible systemd
shit all you have to do is try to update/upgrade the thing and it’s like rolling the dice if it’ll bork your system or not so they’ve done an excellent job in people hating them for that one reason.
without fail whenever they roll out an update you’ll see threads on mastodon or bluesky with people saying “welp, my Ubuntu is fucked” after an update.
tbf ive been using it for years and never had it break on update.
That is the correct move for them. Once you have built a lot of capital, whether that be monetary, political, or social, then you spend the capital.
Ubuntu is a South African ethical ideology focusing on people’s allegiances and relations with each other. The word comes from the Zulu and Xhosa languages. Ubuntu is seen as a traditional African concept, is regarded as one of the founding principles of the new republic of South Africa and is connected to the idea of an African Renaissance.
A rough translation of the principle of Ubuntu is “humanity towards others”. Another translation could be: “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”.
“A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”
–Archbishop Desmond Tutu
As a platform based on Free software, the Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of ubuntu to the software world.
If you come from South Africa, you’ll know that Ubuntu is bullshit, in SA it’s just “fuck you, I got mine”.
At least link to the correct thing: https://bark.lgbt/@gimmechocolate/115164408860865811
Holy Hell! The twists! (spoilers) I couldn’t believe when an Ubuntu mod said “if we let you say you’re queer, we would also have to let people say they hate you and want you dead.” I was even more shocked when they were acting appropriately- Nazis are a protected class at Ubuntu (this is only a little hyperbolic and also that’s all the spoilers)
Reddit flagged this as inaccurate and the mod added this:
The issue was never with the poster’s self identification. The Ubuntu Community Council have been contacted and have been discussing the issue since Friday it happened.
The Ubuntu Community Council rarely comments publicly when complaints are dealt with, but the moderation team is welcome to do so.
Because I am on the Ubuntu Community Council and have been working on this issue, I am unable to comment further at this time.
That doesn’t make sense. The only change to the comment was to remove part of their statement of identity.
So “we’re not taking an anti-queer ‘Don’t say gay’ stance”
It’s inaccurate mis-information, our official policy "We don’t comment publicly about policies and complaints our official stance is ‘no comments’ "
I’m calling this a “big ouf” moment
I don’t see where the mods made them change it. (Edit: I see it now. If you check the edit history on the post, it shows who made the edits, in this case it was DIscourse mod wild_man.)
Also, why is this a link to reddit?
The post on Mastodon has a screenshot of the post edit history:
And a copy-pasted response from a moderator (the most relevant bit):
So in my opinion, if your intention was to show political support for diversity, you should avoid using this flag. This will allow us to refuse the use of a flag for instance saying ‘non-queer’, If we allow your flag, then we have to admit also other similar political flags, both supporting and opposing diversity.
“If we allow your flag, then we have to admit also other similar political flags, both supporting and opposing diversity.”
Consider the following: no, they don’t.
People unironicly think being trans is a political statement. People are really dumb.
Crazy statement, if we accept the gays we should accept the nazis too.
Our terminal liberalism forbids us from saying one thing is better or worse than another thing !
You have to understand, it just wouldn’t be fair to put inclusion over exclusion ! You care about equality, don’t you?
Sure, up to the point where they harass someone or attack them, or have a history of doing so. A belief of “I think some people do not deserve to exist” is different from a belief of “People should be allowed to X” or “People who Y should not be harassed”. A nazi sympathizer who thinks nazis shouldn’t be attacked is fine, a nazi who attacks others is not.
Nah, fuck nazis. They don’t deserve to exist.
I agree in principle, but you’re not going to win any battles with that mindset. They’ll just respond with “so much for the tolerant left”. Victimization is a beloved pastime for them.
A brick is approaching a Nazi’s teeth from an initial distance of 10m horizontally and a velocity of 10m/s. You may assume the absence of air resistance and treat the brick as a point mass.
Calculate the initial angle(s) required to remove the most teeth and determine whether the Nazi can complain about the tolerant left before a brick removes their ability to speak.
But why must they also allow bigotry if they allow people to express who they are? That is the biggest load of shit. So if I say “I have a husband of X years,” they must also allow someone to say a bunch of bigotry as a counter view?
Or if I say I like open source software they must allow the trolls that want to call me a dirty hippie and tell me to get a job so I can pay for software? And I agree everything is political, and ignoring it doesn’t make it any less so.
But there aren’t any political flags on there…
The flag wasn’t removed?
Removed by mod
I take offense at this. I am autistic, this mod in question is just a bigot.
What I want to know now is whether this mod is associated with Canonical in any capacity.On further research, this happened on the official Ubuntu boards, not Reddit as the link here implies. That makes this even more egregious. Canonical employees and official Ubuntu maintainers are responsible for this brazen homophobia. I gave up Ubuntu some time ago over Snaps and other creepy capitalist behavior, but this is a new low I didn’t expect from them.
People, don’t use Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, or anything from Canonical. It you need Debian compatibility try Mint or Debian, otherwise try Fedora. Bazzite is also amazing if all you do is play games. Canonical is just as evil and corrupt as the other big companies.
I’m not sure why you’re moralizing so hard. I dont use ubuntu or any of their products.
In the first line I was attempting to make a joke, since I am autistic and the mod - or mods - clearly are bigots.
The post-strikethrough comments aren’t directed at you, but at the disgusting behavior of Canonical. I’m sincerely sorry if I didn’t make that part quite clear. ☹️
I remember earlier this year when conservatives used autism to justify elon’s nazi salutes.
Don’t be like that.
I’m still pissed about this. they didn’t give half a shit about being considerate about autism before
Removed by mod
It’s neat how the surest way to get a drive by internet autism diagnosis is just to do something bigots like.
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That response does not appear on the Ubuntu site. There is no source on the mastodon paste.
The OP on Mastodon shared screenshots of the replies (can’t tell if they were originally in the forum post, or if it’s a DM):
Okay, that’s pretty difficult to read but it’s something.
But I checked the Ubuntu Discourse thread just now, and the statement “I am queer” has been restored by a mod. Hopefully the other mods are reminded of the policies they’re supposed to be following.
I thought they just went with “if you upgrade you will break it”.
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Removed by mod
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
No u
Lmao, roasted! Flamed, even!
