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.
The Nixpkgs repo is a Git repository. I forked the repository and I merge in updates using the normal git workflow. I've tried flakes and stuff, but none of them are as convenient as directly modifying files.
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.
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.
> The Nix Steering Committee (SC) (https://nixos.org/community/teams/steering-committee/) is the elected community leadership body. It was established as part of the Nix governance constitution (https://github.com/NixOS/org/blob/main/doc/constitution.md) last year, after which the first elections were held, where 450 contributors voted for the current members. This years election (https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announc...) is currently in progress. The SC generally is responsible over project direction and community matters, including management of teams. While most responsibilities are delegated, the SC has the authority to step in when necessary.
> The moderation team (https://nixos.org/community/teams/moderation/) was established before the SC or constitution existed. The initial moderators were appointed from RFC 102 (https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/blob/master/rfcs/0102-moderati...), with the mandate to self-select successors. Over the years the team has changed members a lot, none of the initial members are part of it anymore, and the last larger rotation happened last year. The responsibilities include moderation according to the Code of Conduct (CoC) (https://github.com/NixOS/.github/blob/master/CODE\_OF\_CONDU...) of the official community spaces, which is mostly the Discourse and a bunch of Matrix channels. Earlier this year the now-existing SC took on the responsibility of approving new mod team members and CoC changes (https://discourse.nixos.org/t/code-of-conduct-and-moderation...).