Planet KDE and similar sites exist to show the people in the communities, what they are working on and what their interests and characters are. It’s not an official news site like KDE Dot News and it’s not even on the kde.org domain which I find disappointing. Posts on topics outwith KDE are encouraged as that gives insight into our friends we work with and builds community.
Some Planet sites take that a bit too far with people posting daily updates on what they had for breakfast each day which is just boring so we long since added a rule that the majority of content on the feed should be about KDE, but not by any means all of it.
A community where people are afraid to politics because they might annoy people is a scary community indeed. One of the problems with the EU and indeed the referendum the UK is having is there is precious little discussion about it, even though it affects the future of the UK, everyone in the EU and indeed everyone in KDE.
From the policy which you can find under Add your Blog:
The majority of content in your blog should be about KDE and your work on KDE. Blog posts about personal subjects are also encouraged since Planet KDE is a chance to learn more about the developers behind KDE.
I still don’t agree that political posts can be categorized as “personal posts”.
But well since you yourself have designed that rules for PlanetKDE.. I think my opinion here doesn’t matter much and if I don’t agree with rules, I should start discussion somewhere else..
Thanks for posting this, I do agree that your post about the referendum was not off topic.
P.S.
Note that planet.kde.org redirects to planetkde.org, so I think we can consider it as part of the kde.org domain.
“A community where people are afraid to politics because they might annoy people is a scary community indeed. ”
It happens, especially for highly polarizing opinions. One of the many reasons I don’t share my views with anyone else than myself.
That said, I don’t think the readership of Planet KDE is even fit for political posts.
“and it’s not even on the kde.org” -> Is it not? planet.kde.org is redirecting to planetkde.org, so in a sense, it is. :o)
As a KDE sysadmin, I would happily invert that redirect (make planetkde.org redirect to planet.kde.org) to invalidate that nonsense argument.
That would make more sense indeed, and follow the scheme of debian, gentoo, ubuntu,…. The planet is part of the community, not a random other website.
+1
While it can be argued whether politics are “personal” or not (I think it can be) I do think, that bringing non-KDE issues up on planetkde once in a while is good.
If the author is able to bring up good points for one way or another, it’s even important to be shared. Meaning, things like “Drumpf is an egomaniac jerk” or “Hildegard is a lying bitch” are not politics, they are insulting opinions. Your post however was about politics with an opinion. So, for me this is totally OK.
I love following the various Planets (although, as a Kubuntu and Ubuntu Server user, these days I only have Planet KDE and Planet Ubuntu in my RSS feeds) for not just the news about Free Software and related development, but also to get an idea about the lives and concerns of the same people beyond Free Software. Particularly when they come as well-argued and detailed posts like yours, I’m all for it, and in general IMHO it helps create a better idea of what people in the community are thinking, which in turn strengthens the community feelings.
Was I scrolling through Planet KDE in my ownCloud News instance expecting to read a political argument about the “Brexit” vote? Nope! But as a Canadian+American who always disliked the arbitrary bounds of nationalities, figures much of the problems in politics would be at very least mitigated if people cared and discussed more, and is just generally always happy to hear people discuss what they’re passionate about, I was glad to see it!
It’s clearly a discussion whose outcome will affect many lives, and one of the best things about a good community is being able to have meaningful discussions. So I’d like to believe that even if I had read your post and came away from it vehemently disagreeing, I’d still be proud to be part of a community where you felt you could publicly express your political views and conclusions 🙂