It feels like a dream, 10 years ago, chatting with people from many projects, excited about the world we were building towards.
There was a "free software" community then, full of folks who cared deeply about human rights and freedom and who saw free and open software systems as an important part of that work.
That community is gone. Fractured by problems discussed then that, in hindsight, I now understand to be deeply rooted in the tenets and infrastructure of the movement.
It is possible to construct several narratives about how we got from then to now; the corporatisation of sponsorship, the wider reactionary movements against feminism, the normalization of authoritarianism, the centralization and fracturing of online spaces, and most recently those preaching the doctrine of claude et al.
They are all equally true, and just as equally entangled with each other.
Working together to destroy the illusion that there was a space with enough shared ground to work.