Communities of Not | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
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Communities of Not
written on June 06, 2026
There is a strange thing that happens in communities that gather around<br>abstinence from something: identity from opposition. At their best these<br>communities are not just negative: childfree spaces can be about autonomy,<br>choice and acceptance, anti-car spaces about safer streets and transit, and<br>LLM-skeptical developer spaces about the future of labor, code quality and<br>slop1. But the thing being refused often does not go away and instead<br>becomes the main subject of the community’s identity.
That would be fine if it stayed at criticism, maybe even angry criticism, but<br>more often than not it turns into policing and hatred towards others. An<br>influencer without children becomes a parent, an urban bike commuter by choice<br>buys a Porsche, a respected developer tries LLMs, and the community feels<br>betrayed because it assumed they were members of the same tribe. The expulsion<br>of that person (who never signed up to be a community member) is entirely<br>imaginary but the punishment that the community unleashes is not: people pile on<br>and shame them, quote them out of context and turn their weakest moments into<br>proof that the person was always unserious, a sharlatan or should not be<br>listened to.
I do not think the answer is to tell people to stop paying attention. Cars<br>shape cities even for people who cycle, children influence politics, workplaces<br>and taxes even for people who do not have them. For us developers, LLMs show up<br>in editors, issue trackers, hiring conversations, management pressure and code<br>reviews whether we asked for them or not. Resisting that can be legitimate but<br>that is no excuse for using one’s rejection to justify shitty mob behavior.
I understand the thinking all too well, because I have done versions of this<br>myself in the past. It took me a while to become more accepting of other<br>people’s worldviews that diverge from mine. Whatever insecurities we have,<br>finding a group of others sharing them can be comforting. The danger is that<br>being part of a crowd of negativity can easily make us part of collective<br>harassment.
I can only encourage you to breathe, slow down, de-escalate when given the<br>chance, and resist the temptation to always assume the most catastrophic<br>reading. Default to being open to new things.<br>Being negative towards something, and making that ones identity, is an easy trap<br>to fall into.
These examples are not meant as equivalents. The recent<br>mob against<br>rsync<br>is the LLM version that prompted this post. I picked the others because I’m<br>familiar with those communities and they all show similar cases of personal<br>choices being interpreted as betrayal.↩
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