So let me get this straight, from what I've seen:

When someone makes a list of softwares created by fans of slop generators (who likely use said slop generators when writing these softwares), listing non-slop alternatives instead, so that people who are not into slop can learn which alternatives can they use: that's a horrible, terrible harassment.

When slop fans start dogpiling on the list creator in the list creator mentions/replies, trying to splain that slop is the best thing ever, and ultimately get the list creator to take the list down and leave FOSS community and the social networks: that's normal and healthy and community-building.

@IngaLovinde harassment begets harassment i suppose

@IngaLovinde oh my. I just saw the list some days ago and just thought ohh cool that this exists and moved on.

@nachtpfoetchen and now it doesn't exist anymore :(

@charlotte what do you mean?

@IngaLovinde if you create a list of people that you deem bad, this is a harassment list. even if it’s not your explicit intent of the list. even then the slopware list didn’t originally come with a warning against harassment and when it was added it originally specifically said it was acceptable to “complain” to them “respectfully and constructively” (if your goal was to avoid harassment, why specifically say it is acceptable for readers who are likely very emotionally invested in this to reach out to the authors?)

it probably didn’t help that the list was quite bad when it first came out (recommending software by fascists over software which LLMs generated code for, or warning against using a screen reader with no alternative and later adding one that is seemingly abandoned), or their unwillingness to explain why this is bad until shortly before (seemingly) it was deleted.

needless to say harassment isn’t acceptable, nor do i have a picture of who harrassed who specifically. i am not trying to minimize what happened here, but rather that this is arguably expected with the nature of the list posted.

and also like for the most part this list is punching side- and downwards. the browser section for example listed firefox and some forks of it. notably not google chrome. while vs code is listed, the recommended alternative shares almost the entire codebase with vs code. The problems of AI are almost entirely caused by the rich people on top deciding to invest heavily in AI and a lot less with individual users of it

@IngaLovinde yeah. Just found some reddit thread of people harassing the author. This really isn’t a community.

@nachtpfoetchen @IngaLovinde is there a list of fedi users I should just turboblock from my end for my sanity

@sam @IngaLovinde such lists do exist my some cool people also tend to end up on these because stuff gets taken out of context, people don’t understand cultural differences, etc. so i wouldn’t suggest blindly following these.

@nachtpfoetchen @sam there is a huge difference between "here is a ginormous list of thousands of people which we claim are terrible and you should block them en masse without going through the list, and also your instance admins should block them for you", and "here is a list of some dozens of projects which are likely to be sloppified, so you might want to consider these alternatives instead".
Both in scale and in consequences and in the fact that blocking a connection between two people is absolutely not the same as choosing to use another software.

@charlotte but it was not a list of people, it was list of software?

And I think that it makes sense that "if you don't like slop: here are projects that are infested with slop and alternatives to them" list, in its first iteration, does not spend a lot of time explaining why you shouldn't like slop. Because its target audience is people who already don't like slop.

VSCodium is a FOSS fork of VSCode with AI bits removed (and other improvements), so I think it's reasonable to list it as an alternative to corporate VSCode, specifically in the context of avoiding slop?

(And not sure what fascists/slop dilemma are you talking about, I'd guess that it's about serde vs facet? But the version of the list I saw listed both serde and facet as something to avoid, and tinyserde as an alternative.)

@IngaLovinde

software that is written by people, in some cases even specifically named

the list also treated “has specific ai features”, “has llm contributions”, “one of the devs has used LLMs for coding”, and “dev has used LLMs at all before” pretty much interchangeably. microsoft claims 20-30% of their new code is LLM-generated which ought to place vs codium at least on the level of projects with LLM-generated code inclusions

as i said these were some earlier issues, but there was an about 4 hour gap between when serde was first recommended and when that stopped.

for about an hour the list contained exactly one project (cargo-nextest), maintained by a trans person. it took several hours of community submissions before vscode or firefox were introduced, both of which are both far more widely used and even include ai-specific features enabled by default.

I learned that The List was discussed on Reddit, so I made a mistake of searching for these discussions and 🤮 oh my god.
I wish all IT a very burn in fire.

Also half of them are like "lol, woke snowflake communist antis only hate AI because it's fashionable to hate it, they have no idea what AI is or why they hate it, they left the explanation section in their draft list blank"... and mfs, zkat was posting about "AI" bullshit for _years_, and the main target audience of the list are the people who don't need an explanation because they already know why; makes sense that writing a good explanation was not a priority.

Although I would have just linked to https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/26/i-am-an-ai-hater.html

@IngaLovinde adding to that, i think there is a lot of value in a list for people that just want to deal with ai code in their free time, but like to contribute to open source in their free time. I really don't understand why so many people don't get that.

@nachtpfoetchen because slop fans just cannot live with the thought that there is a list of their slop projects, and because (looking at reddit) they literally hate people who are against slop in the same way and with the same vitriol as maga hates "the libs" and "the woke".

@IngaLovinde it really feels like they are in kind of a cult. An "us" vs "the anti-ai haters". I really miss any nuance in these online threads as what i usually find when i talk with people about ai.
Maybe social media just is the wrong tool for community building as somehow it always leads to these people finding each other and harassing people?

@nachtpfoetchen it's not "the anti-ai haters". On reddits and other socials they already came up with the name for us; for them, we're all "the antis" and "the commies" who don't know anything and have never wrote a line of code in our lives (which includes zkat somehow) and only reproduce "AI bad" because we read "AI bad" on commie part of bluesky once, and woke commies need something to hate or their woke commies card will be cancelled.

@memoria @charlotte yes, that's right