dansup, the maintainer of Pixelfed, Loops (which NLnet helps fund), and FediDB, among others, is a dangerous force in the fediverse community. With a follower count of over 22 thousand, he has repeatedly shown himself to be hostile to fellow FOSS fediverse developers, have a lack of care for open-sourcing his work, and be in favour of injecting the fediverse with advertisements. He has also proved himself to be prone to conspiratorial thinking, regrettable public statements, and embarrassingly public meltdowns.
We, the undersigned, believe that dansup's actions, culminating in the public meltdown of 2024-12-30, are not merely isolated incidents, but a pattern of hostility, deflection, lack of accountability, appeal to emotion, and tactlessness.
We urge NLnet to pull funding from Loops immediately. We have compiled a recounting of events highlighting dansup's unprofessionalism and hostility towards developers smaller than him, which can be found here.
We urge dansup to temporarily step down from maintainership positions, and to take a break from fedi. We acknowledge that these actions are likely the result of burnout from being overworked and underappreciated.
We believe dansup has done a lot of good for the fediverse as an ecosystem. We acknowledge the large userbase of Pixelfed, a project spearheaded and maintained by dansup; we additionally acknowledge the work that he has done championing the fediverse and putting time and effort into developing tools and platforms for it. However, we remain confident that dansup's actions are unacceptable behaviour coming from a project maintainer, especially considering his position of power relative to his peers, and that he should rethink this behaviour.
Signed,
This open letter has been authored by contributors who wish to remain anonymous. The authors, as well as some of the undersigned, are friends and acquaintances of hazycora, and as such, we acknowledge any potential conflicts of interest stemming from our relationship. Nonetheless, we insist that dansup's actions towards Hazel and others are unacceptable, and that his grant should be revoked.
hazycora has provided screenshots of private conversations with dansup, and has confirmed the accuracy of the appendix prior to publishing. pixeldesu has provided the authors with links to now-deleted public posts by dansup. Neither had any other control over the appendix and did not write any portion of it.