I’m not a GrapheneOS developer, nor part of the GrapheneOS team, I’m a GrapheneOS user and community member. I can’t go ship code. Agreed that open source development is a difficult work environment due to some people feeling heavily entitled and those people being very vocal. As to for the actual GrapheneOS team, they would love to waste less time with responding to attacks and false information. However, it’s a very normal, human response to not want misinformation about yourself and your project to thrive all across the internet. This also can hurt the project in many ways, it’s not an ego thing.

I’m in active community member in the GrapheneOS community. I go by the same name there as I’m using here. It became clear from the community chat that a lot of misinformation and lies are spread about GrapheneOS on social media. I’m passionate about the project, which I rely upon everyday so I want to do my part in helping to correct any misinformation out there. You can’t argue with the fact that the post that has been made is a complete lie. The title is a complete falsehood. They were not a contributor, nor are they banned from using GrapheneOS. The reason I’m active in multiple communities on Lemmy about this is because the OP has decided to spread his blogpost on multiple Lemmy instances, mtuliple subreddits, Mastodon, Linkedin, … If they spread in in multiple channels, users and community members who want to discuss GrapheneOS online will also show up in multiple channels to discuss it. I would prefer to only have to reply to one post, they decided to make 12 posts on Lemmy (if I counted correctly). And yes, I made my account yesterday. Am I not allowed? Do I have to wait 2 years and engage in random discussions not related to my interests before I join the threads about topics that I’m passionate about?

It’s a team of around 10 full time developers and also other project members with moderation responsibilities. Some of them sadly have to deal with adressing harassment on a daily basis yes. But what is the alterantive? Just letting yourself be harassed? Would you also reply like this to a person getting bullied? “Just ingore the bullies, don’t defend yourself against them and let your personality speak for yourself!” That’s not fair. GrapheneOS has every right to defend themselves.

Most people get banned for a clearly stated reason and many people who post harassment material in the community even get given second chances if it becomes clear they just do this because they are misinformed instead of being malicious.

GrapheneOS does not make many posts on their social media timelines about other projects which other people think are competing in the same space as GrapheneOS. Most of their posts referring to other projects are in reply of posts from other people that tagged (@'ed) GrapheneOS in their post. GrapheneOS replies to these people to inform them. Like many companies and oranganisation do, it’s okay to point out how your project differs from others.

Many projects that claim or think to compete with GrapheneOS make many claims regarding the security and privacy they would offer even if their appraoch actually is detrimental to security and privacy compared to the upstream projects (AOSP) they are based on. This mismarketing is a big problem, it makes sense that GrapheneOS points this out if people are tagging them in social media post while putting them in the same category as those other OSes.

You are also reverting the situation. The other projects started personal attacks and harassment first. GrapheneOS just replies to it. Defending yourself from harassment and bullying is not bullying. Don’t blame the victim. Don’t rever the roles.