Edit: originally posted here on 2023-11-17.
Edit 2: "blocking protecting marginalised community members from abuse" refers to the events during the incident (which was never made public, which unfortunately leaves me unable to provide more detail) that prompted the creation of the Community Council to begin with.
Edit 3: please note that this statement was originally addressed to the F-Droid team, not a general audience.
With a heavy heart, I have no choice but to leave @fdroid, effective immediately.
All I ever wanted was to help people.
It's why I stuck around after helping out with Reproducible Builds (making signature copying work) and applied to become a core contributor.
It's why I worked on Reproducible Builds, fdroidserver, fdroiddata, the F-Droid website, documentation, fdroidclient, the status page, security scans for CVEs, writing policy, etc. etc.
It's why I constantly kept tabs on issues and MRs across the project to see if I could help with anything.
It's why I wanted to help the community, became a moderator, joined the outreach team, joined many board & team meetings, applied for the Community Council.
Sadly I had to give up on things like signed tags and HSM support, improving the website, working on improving fdroidserver, because it was never a priority and I could not get my MRs reviewed and merged.
According to Hans, "many people" have expressed "concerns" about me -- though for some reason not during the period expressly meant for people to voice those, apparently only to him in private, mysteriously never mentioned before now, and that cannot be named for some reason.
Concerns that are simultaneously both too unimportant to address so I can defend myself (and apparently not an issue for me joining ComCo), yet more than enough for Hans to unilaterally block me from getting Maintainer status on gitlab, even though the board -- including Hans -- voted to grant me that, which Hans then blocked for weeks using a myriad of counterfactuals as justification.
Concerns that will cause a "fight" (I will assume that was not meant as a threat) if pressed on.
And when pressed the best we get is that I was "disrespectful", "hurtful" (even though I immediately apologised for the thing I said in frustration during the meeting, something Hans has never done to me once, has in fact refused any kind of mediation for the issues between us for months), anger directed at me for trying to hold Hans accountable for blocking protecting marginalised community members from abuse and making F-Droid unnecessarily unwelcoming.
Hans refused all mediation for our interpersonal conflict, which I did everything I could to fix, and thought we had at least moved past to some extent recently. But he refused to talk about it, denied me a chance to apologise for my own mistakes. Accused me of not assuming good faith -- when I consistently said I thought he meant well. And then used the existence of that conflict -- the "concerns" about me being "disrespectful" -- as a justification for his unilateral actions against me.
Sadly, this is not a single incident -- if it was I would still believe things could be fixed -- but a pattern of behaviour that has continued for years. I've tried to be patient, hoping we could still resolve things, give everyone the benefit of the doubt as I constantly have. But clearly, this is not possible as long as Hans refuses any and all accountability for his actions, and any attempts at mediation to resolve the interpersonal friction and conflicts.
Hans' actions have repeatedly hurt me (and others) -- which I always said and believed was unintentional. I cannot be part of ComCo -- a team established to "ensure our community is welcoming to everyone, upholds our shared values, and remains respectful, energetic, and creative" -- if I don't feel welcome or safe here myself, if people can just raise and hide behind unspecified "concerns" about team members to avoid actually dealing with problems and conflicts, if avoiding and ignoring problems and unintended harmful consequences is perfectly acceptable but merely expecting people to be accountable for such actions is "disrespectful" and "hurtful" and cause to be sidelined.
Unfortunately -- as there is no way to avoid mentioning him and his actions even indirectly -- this may look like a "personal attack" on Hans. This is certainly not intended to be anything like that. I always thought he meant well, and repeatedly said so. I certainly did not hold a grudge. The current incident has thus totally blindsided and baffled me.
Hans refers to https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/401, claiming @TheLastProject and @IzzySoft followed community procedure whilst I did not.
However, the issue itself clearly states:
no "lazy consensus" needed in this special case as we need this as immediate stop-gap
And Hans himself wrote:
the board voted to give @IzzySoft Maintainer privileges to the F-Droid group on gitlab.com
And this is only a single example of Hans using counterfactuals as justification for his unilateral actions.
I just now read your statement, and while i dont grasp the full problem (which isnt't helped by half ths statements beeing 'confidential'), let me tell your that i was flaggerbasted by your and the other's help on getting my app added as reproducible on fdroid.
While the task hasn't been finished yet, without your help i would not have been able to get to the point with it where it is now, and i am very grateful for your contributions to that process.