That doesn’t apply to Linux communities on Lemmy though, but I meet a lot of Linux communities, that are toxic and beginner-unfriendly. People, who have voluntarily decided to maintain a community, behave like I broke into their house at 3 AM with my questions. If I ask a question, there will be a 20% chance to get any relevant response, but a 100% chance of being nagged with some bullshit. It especially applies to the behaviour of mods. For instance, a dude was messing with me because I have searched for a binary on the official internet database, instead of quering it via package manager.
I wish I could just avoid junkyards like that, but I can’t: I haven’t found another active community for Void Linux.
As far as I can tell from my experience, it is something specific to Linux or IT communities.
So why is it like this?
Imagine every day I ask you what the color of the sky is. There are a bunch of forum threads that tell me the sky color, there is a wiki with sky color information, and the search can give me the sky colour. I have all the information I need to work out the sky color, but I still keep asking you.
That is what these communities often deal with, it grinds you down and gives you have a short fuse.
The same thing happens in trans communities, but the answer isn’t for the old guard to try and handle everything themselves, burn out and then shut down newbies that are looking for community and help.
The answer is for the crusty old guard to create the space and keep the worst offenders out, whilst letting the people that aren’t burnt out support each other and keep the community thriving.
Sometimes that means letting common questions be common, because if you’ve got a positive community, someone will always be there with an answer and a link to an even more detailed resource.
If the newbies don’t stick around to contribute back, then that doesn’t work well. The trans community (at least from an outsiders perspective) seem a lot more close-knit, so it probably works better?
For technical communities, it doesn’t seem like the communal support exists to the same degree. Newbies come in, get their answer and leave. :(
I guess because an answer to a technical question doesn’t affect someone’s whole life.
I’ll always be in debt to the Trans community here on Lemmy because of how they helped me, even though I’m not a member of the community.
Why bother even engaging though. There will always be those repeats it’s inevitable. It’s just because people still want an excuse to dunk. Just ignore and the poster will figure it out themselves, the whole point of posting instead of searching first is laziness.
Whether you engage or not, its a constant noise that has to be dealt with.
Then the settings for sky color are not there.
In the Linux community, it’s mostly the people who are developing the software who are also supporting the forums. To them, the forums are a way of communicating with others who are also working on improving the software. So at the end of the day, to them the forums are doing their job when people are contributing new content and ideas and making their lives easier.
Unfortunately, people new to the forums are going to be there to get assistance, asking questions about the stuff these people documented specifically so nobody would have to take them away from creating neat new things to hand hold them through using the older things. And most of these people aren’t technical writers or even communicators.
If you were somehow in a forum with a bunch of Windows, Android or macOS developers, you’d probably find the same level of toxic before long.
Because it’s not about you. It’s that you’re following the same learning curve of hundreds of others before you, and it causes these people to have to repeatedly stop what brings them joy to explain the same thing to yet another person. Or, you’ve got a new question. THAT means that nobody likely has the answer, and somebody needs to figure it out and then document it and then point you at the documentation, instead of doing what they want to be doing in their limited free time.
The Linux communities that aren’t like this tend to be small, or have a large education contingent, or are privately funded and so have professional communicators managing the forums.
It’s not a Linux thing at all. I have a lot of different hobby interests and I find gatekeeping everywhere. I don’t even think it’s limited to hobbies. Gatekeeping seems to be a natural human social behaviour.
There’s so much denial here. Linux users even have their own pidgin for being toxic. “your fault: wrong distro”, “pebkac”, “skill issue”, “works fine on MY system” (same models can have different sound, wifi, and bluetooth chips). They can’t even get along with each other when different distros, init systems, display servers, etc., are discussed.
Sure, it goes on elsewhere: in Religion and Politics which is why both are banned from discussion in many bars/pubs.
I think you misunderstood me. I’m not saying that gatekeeping doesn’t exist in Linux communities. It absolutely does, and I wouldn’t quibble if you said Linux was rife with gatekeeping.
What I’m saying is that gatekeeping isn’t unique to Linux in any way. Gatekeeping is everywhere, and I argue that it’s a default social behaviour that arises in communities above a certain size, unless specifically guarded against through community norms.
because OS nerds were the original gatekeepers of the internet. they were gate keepers prior to game forums when the internet was still new. It’s like waking a vampire that is 9000 yrs old and looks more bat than human and all it knows how to do is screech and hiss.
Everywhere on the Internet at all levels can be toxic. Period.
Yes, but some linux communities are like andrew tate levels of toxic. But instead of hating women, they hate people who don’t know linux.
It would be like andrew tate starting a womens support group, but then still acting like andrew tate. The women coming out of that support group would be confused and bewildered by why people voluntarily choose this.
I remember my first time learning linux existed was in 2005. I posted a message, with zero knowledge at all about linux, and asked what people like about linux. I was trying to decide if I even liked the concept of a non-windows OS.
The first person who replied, said “WE LIKE LINUX BECAUSE WE FUCK YOUR MOM BITCH!!!”
Cool.
And I didn’t try linux that day.
cause of the gatekeepers
Back, in good ol’ days (5 years ago, or so), if you were a software developer you could ask any question on Stackoverflow, by any, I mean any question worthy of time of other users. If your question was considered too easy you would meet multiple beginner unfriendly answers. The portal is probably dead right now, I didn’t bother checking. It was killed by the AI since it will answer any of your simple questions and praise it instead of telling you that you should read the manual. AI is often wrong, but it helps a lot with the issues that most Linux geeks would consider unworthy of their time.
The loudest voices are the ones you hear. There’s a lot of young angsty kids who have gotten into Linux and then become the vocal majority, while wiser folks are off doing other activities that don’t entail berating new comers.
It’s a decentralized community made up of people who refuse to show empathy to anyone who was born in any computer based communities such as Windows or MacOS. It’s the angry nerd dwelling effect sadly.
Because they are annoyed. Imagine getting asked the same thing ten times over and then again, especially when said thing could be easily googled or resolved by reading the manuals.
