Comment by noirscape

Given I don't disagree with you about GOS being the best on security, I think there's only one thing really worth mentioning:

> The attacks towards us including your libelous claims about us here are what's absurdly toxic.

I want to make this clear upfront: I have no connection to /e/, Calyx, DivestOS or whatever other projects you've had issues with over the years. If you've had trouble with them I find that very unfortunate for you, but they are entirely unrelated to this conclusion. I do not consider these claims to be libelous when they're fairly easy to check:

The reason I consider GOS' community to be extremely toxic and find official channels enabling this is for a few very simple reasons:

1. I've seen several incidents of GOS users coming into adjacent Android communities to start beef with those communities while giving off the attitude of zealots. For a concrete example, the F-Droid forums have a thread about Googles impending changes to letting users install their own software ( https://web.archive.org/web/20250903081432/https://forum.f-d... ). The original OP for this thread has a pointless attack on the F-Droid project, declaring GOS to be superior. Moderators eventually changed this to be more mild (but it's why the first replies are snarking on low-hanging fruit about GOS), but I've seen similar behavior in other places - there's a reason that a lot of Android communities generally respond with trepidation and annoyance whenever the project is brought up and it's because of this behavior from the userbase.

2. I can read the GrapheneOS forums; they're public. Nearly every issue I've seen people have with GOS on the forums is effectively met by a "you're holding it wrong". This sets a tone for the community that makes it come across as extremely hostile to potentially interested users.

3. In the same sense, it's trivial to notice that the official GrapheneOS account on this forum is a frequent participant in these discussions, generally backing up the hostility on the virtue of technical accuracy. This to me suggests endorsement of this attitude. (See a sibling to my initial comment where the official account makes a post on the GOS forums about an unrelated blog for daring to recommend a different ROM/phone combo. This to me is not indicative of healthy communications, but rather of an obsession to promote GrapheneOS at every corner.)

4. I remember, as a Bromite user, the futzing with the Vanadium license in order to prevent other Android Chromium forks from making use of it's patches for the crime of... considering a contribution from someone the GOS project has beef with. That to me is the most telling thing really. The goal with that license futzing was never to actually help advance privacy/security or anything like that. It was to try and force a different project to conform to GrapheneOS' demands over something extremely minor and GOS went ballistic and threatened license changes (which they eventually did) the moment the maintainer asked for a bit more information because "GOS doesn't like this person" isn't enough to immediately warrant kicking someone off a project. Cromite (the fork of Bromite, as Bromite's maintainer went AWOL) still doesn't include Vanadiums hardening patches because of this. It's fucking absurd.

4 is the big one for me. It is absolutely unacceptable, unbecoming and to put it plainly: toxic behavior from an official voice in the project. It's fucking rich and borderline hypocritical to talk about GOS' consistent upstreaming of Android hardening patches while making it impossible through a license change for other projects to share it's contributions.

(Here's a source for that btw; https://github.com/bromite/bromite/issues/2141 and https://github.com/bromite/bromite/pull/2102 for the original incident. csagan5 essentially got jumped with extreme hostility for something they couldn't have been aware of and was very reasonable about, and all they got in response was more threats and hostility.)