Leaving F-Droid
Hey @fdroid,
As stated in the board meeting I will be leaving F-Droid. The events in the past several months (or, to be more precise, the many years of a repeated pattern of issues that never got properly resolved or even properly talked about, including this one) have caused immense stress. I'm disappointed by the lack of progress, I'm feeling burned out and I simply cannot continue in this environment.
I am currently the only (or only one shared together with other people quitting/taking an indefinite break) administrator in the following positions, which would need to have someone take over these duties:
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Google Play "Free Your Android" account -
Twitter/X account -
Telegram @fdroidorg
channel -
Telegram F-Droid Translator bridge -
F-Droid Translator moderation -
Forum security updates -
F-Droid status page (SSH access, Uptime Kuma credentials and Matrix bot for both production and staging) -
F-Droid meeting alert bot (repo + Matrix account for bot)
There are also the following systems which will now have a low bus factor:
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General Matrix moderation, including mjolnir (I have been taking it slow the past days already and noticed several spam messages were not deleted, so more people are needed) -
Mastodon account (only Izzy) -
Forum admin (only Licaon) -
Mailcow (only Hans) -
GitHub fdroid-oauth (only Festplattenschnitzel)
Please remove me as admin from the following as they don't let me do it myself:
-
Forum -
Weblate
To further explain my decision:
I have been quite concerned about the way F-Droid has been ran for a while, how rules are made up on the spot, how leadership then acts like these rules have always existed, how established rules sometimes get ignored when inconvenient and how the opinions of others get dismissed or ignored. I have been feeling quite unhappy inside F-Droid for quite a while, but I held hope that having the board would help fix some of these long-standing issues by having a new leadership layer.
Sadly, I do not feel this has happened. While I have seen great progress within most of the community and the board on moving F-Droid forward, I have been extremely disappointed with how the behaviour of the old leadership has not changed and how rules have still been made up on the spot, this time to block community council progress and dismiss direct board votes. Even more concerningly, when this was pushed on and escalated, leadership often suddenly became unreachable, as if avoiding talking about subjects they didn't want to talk about. Only after this came up in the board meeting (given all attempts to solve this without escalation were made impossible), leadership suddenly talked about there being "concerns" from "many people" on a member of the community council. These concerns were never raised during the multiple moments during community council creation that were planned for this very purpose and only came up when other arguments for not giving all of the community council moderation powers were already dismissed. My frustration on this issue has been further amplified by the fact that leadership raised other "anonymous concerns" before during another incident on another subject, to which I told them to please mention them to the board so they could be dealt with, which they never did. As usual, when pushing for these "concerns" to be raised so they can be resolved, even while keeping the members who raised them anonymous, there was a push to "just move on", insisting on ignoring the problem instead of fixing it. The fact that, even with board escalation, we never truly heard the concerns is beyond frustrating.
I wish I could honestly believe this was a one-off case, but I believe there is a pattern of this type of behaviour and a lack of accountability. In several occasions, such as the recent issues with an app developer, I have been put into extremely stressful situations when trying to de-escalate these issues and protect F-Droid and the team. Seeing that even when escalating this to the new board it is seemingly still not possible to make progress has broken my last piece of hope this can ever be truly solved, that this pattern can be broken.
It does not feel possible to be part of a community council, which has to protect the community and solve issues within the community, if we cannot even solve issues between ourselves and ongoing tensions are never resolved.
I do not believe a community council can protect the community, de-escalate conflict and help keep F-Droid moving forward under these conditions.
And I do not believe I can function under these condition, under constant worrying about what "anonymous concerns" might be raised against me, hanging over me to be used against me when convenient, or what new rules will be made up on the spot to keep from being able to keep the community safe.
Because of this I will be leaving F-Droid. I wish it didn't have to come to this, I have spent several months trying to figure out how I could stay, but I simply cannot find a way any longer.