cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5257349
Fore some times, mastodon has been unsafe for black and other minorities users, the peoples impacted by this have been complaining about it openly, emphasizing the lack of good moderation tools to make instances safer. The 
s on the dev team and userbase however have essentially plugged their ears and refused to listen, and instead engaged in bad faith, tone policing, minimizing racism, dismissing the testimony of black users, and telling them to "curate their experience better" with filters and blocks (even though a big part of the complaint is that this doesn't work).
Seeing this, some black peoples who have been complaining about racism on mastodon and the lack of security features to deal with it have taken things in their own hands and made a fork of Mastodon named Awujo.
This whole saga (and my own personal experience in another FOSS project this past year) has really punctuated that FOSS conceived as an exercise in collective ownership is a lie. Instead of large companies, FOSS is ruled by a collection of petty tyrants clinging to ownership of release channels. The release channel is the thing in FOSS. Arbitrating what gets distributed through a release channel is what gives people clout & power in the FOSS world, and these are - almost universally - not democratically controlled. Whenever people criticize a project, they are usually given one of two replies:
#1 is barely worth addressing, it's equivalent to telling someone to go fuck themselves or "if you don't like it, leave". PRs are much more malicious because it's just leading people on. Getting them to waste their time doing a bunch of work that the tyrant always intended to throw away in retribution. I contribute to a project where, when I'm writing a feature, the thing at the top of my mind is "how can I build a pseudo-legal case why this should be merged" instead of "how can I make this change safely on a technical level". Because access to the project is gated by a mercurial tyrant. I only persist because the project is amazing and if I don't deal with this man (and it is almost always men) other people will continue to be driven away by him.
At this point I am verging on changing my definition of "FOSS project" to require democratic governance.
This reminds me of The Tyranny of Structurelessness, a great article about how organizations without formal power structures inevitably become oppressive.
Informal power structures are still power structures but the positions of power are not chosen in a democratic way. Popularity and perceived necessity to the organization are the only things that matter. Because leadership in informal power structures is taken not given, people who abuse power are more likely to end up in those positions.
I would not say it is structureless - actually the structure is very precisely encoded in access permissions for the repo. A clear hierarchy exists from owner/maintainer/collaborator/contributor.