If you've been part of an organization or a community that has undergone a big conflict or a schism, you'd understand. Plus this community largely communicates exclusively over text, which doesn't really work well for community repair. It's difficult to get people to feel OK with each other, or spend time together not arguing, when they only ever write intense letters to each other. Plus social work with technical people that spend most of their lives looking at a computer, not interacting with people face-to-face, does not exactly lend itself to socio-emotional maturity. Seems like in the case of Nix, the more mature people have repeatedly gotten burned out trying to tend to the mess and create a healthy community. It's extremely difficult to get someone to be humble, listen, reflect, and grow, when they are already upset and have their defenses up. And without our normal human tools or other trusted peers to help, like we can call on in real life, it can sometimes be near impossible.

Plus, in our highly individualized and hierarchical society, people don't have a lot of practice making decisions democratically, or coming to a consensus with people they disagree with. "Group projects" in grade school is pretty much the only time this happens during our socialization, which is incredibly sparse and inadequate. Anthropologically speaking, we should be doing this nearly every day.

The most obvious cause was forcing BDFL and creator Eelco to step down

https://lwn.net/Articles/970824/

The moderation team posted an open letter demanding he step down, among other reasons this accused him of jeopardizing the safety of people from "marginalized backgrounds" and allowing "fascists" in the community

I have tried very hard to find any examples of what this is a actually referring to and genuinely have no idea

https://github.com/save-nix-together/open-letter/blob/main/c...

They had to compete with the rust crew

Because people who do good work get attacked left and right and noone steps up.