It seems to be a combination of a lot of corporations using NixOS and a lot of community members using it as their personal distro. Nix is pretty flexible as a package manager but there are tensions that do crop up and you get arguments over really unimportant things that just sort of escalate because people bring in politics and all sorts of other stuff. And my understanding is that the moderation team was cooling off a lot of these disagreements, but now that there's no moderation team, I'm kind of curious to see what happens.

Disclaimer: I use nixos but try not to participate in it (private fork), after seeing how they treat prospective contributors.

All large organisations have huge amounts of "useless" overhead. When this overhead is removed, you no longer have a large organisation. Sometimes, having a large organisation is worth the overhead: organisations quietly solve a great deal of issues. But, since they do this quietly, it can be hard to tell which issues they solve; and they loudly create a lot of issues, too. This means it can be hard to tell when they are or aren't worth it, and when organisational reform would actually be expected to improve things.

I see it as a reduction in overhead in many ways. Right now moderation doesn’t fall under the elected structure that runs the rest of the project. Bringing it in line with everything else ought to result in less drama.

It mirrors the complexity of Nix and NixOS. Similar to Rust and all its community drama.

> Is any of this overhead really needed?

Moderation is needed, but often abused and used as a tool to create echo chambers.

> What does it accomplish?

As mentioned above, It accomplishes one thing: creating an echo chamber.

Echo cambers are useful, because it shows "wide support" from the community while ignoring the fact that the "community" has been reduced to just the "right people".

For example, in a room there are 100 people, three that have been elected / selected to lead the 97. The three, censor / kick / eliminate 90 people because of their dissenting opinions. Now, the majority (3+7=10) can rule in peace. Quite simple actually.

It's basically authoritarianism that breeds fascism. This is usually a product of the death of objective truth.

Oh! and this is not a LEFT vs. RIGHT problem. Here is a good read: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/bad-governments-on-the-left-...

Idk, “there’s a group of people in charge and we elect them” seems like a pretty basic starting point for any community, not an over-complication!