Comment by pferde
11 hours ago
Can you give examples of what you consider "nasty attitude" on their part? All criticism of other project I've seen was either cold, clinical technical criticism, or defense against slander propagated in the media against GrapheneOS.
I haven't seen GrapheneOS folks going out of their way to attack anyone.
I'll bite.
GrapheneOS has a long history of brigading. They officially encourage it[0] and are now trying to make it a part of their OS[1].
But wait, they are just doing it to The Baddies, right? Setting aside the fact that they frequently claim targeted harassments against them, often with little[2][3] to no[4][5][6][7] evidence (the only heavily cited arguments from them are technical ones), they are using their fanbase for the good of humanity, right? Also, the link I presented earlier[0] doesn't seem that old.
Look no further: Daniel Micay(stinger), threatening another hardened browser Bromite of collaborating with his abuser (submitted one pull request), of stripping their ability to collaborate with him and... changing the license to prevent that, on an open-source project[8]. Don't take my words, the links are there. But honestly I can't think of any reason you have to go that far.
Another crashout on Mozilla's repo: https://web.archive.org/web/20240909072043/https://github.co... . Also notable are his insecurity claims against MicroG, to which one of the contributor replies:
> I'm a bit surprised by you pulling out this issue that was fixed 4 years ago and only affected apps which did not target SDK 23 or higher (which at the time was already a requirement for apps uploaded to Play Store). Your phrasing made me think there might be a new issue, but if this is what you were referring to, all good.
Again, I encourage you to read the entire thread and make up your own mind.
If you believe this behaviour comes from the bygone era before thestinger stepped down, here's a more recent incident: https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2025/08/19/grapheneos-danie... GOS of course responded[9], but not without false claims: GOS accused the author of falsely claiming that he was a GOS contributor, but the author never said that, they instead said they "make a lot of contributions to many different open-source projects, especially security-related ones." (This was not edited after the fact; see [10]) Daniel Micay still manages/frequents many repos of GOS, including grapheneos.org[11], hardened_malloc[12], and os-issue-tracker[13]. You'll also see that the GitHub sponsor is registered to Daniel's account. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this per se, it's just me showing that Daniel still has a substantial influence over the project and, judging from the tone of GOS' toots, he still writes the bulk of them as well. He did write most of the GOS-related comments here on HN under his account before he removed it and created a dedicated GOS account 20 days ago (as of writing).
And this leaves out many unverifiable (but consistent with the above) claims of coordinating attacks on their Matrix chat against projects they deem insecure and/or are a threat. You will have heard a lot of the phrase 'Kiwi Farms' regarding TechLore and Louis Rossmann, but although Louis does seem to have an account there, I couldn't find any activity remotely suggesting of GOS or Daniel over there. I couldn't find any evidence that TL is associated with KF. GrapheneOS also claims Louis "livestreamed" his private DMs, which I cannot corroborate; he may have deleted the livestream, but much more likely, it was simply recorded, judging by the format of the video. As for the supposed 'smear campaign', I think you can judge that by yourself. The videos are still up on YouTube.
What I can see from the above is that Daniel Micay (and by extension GOS) makes a lot of accusatory claims without much to back up, and oversteps his boundaries in order to silence opponents. For technical arguments at least there's a room for discussion, but for other stuff you're just have to take their word. I have never seen an open-source project this adversarial before, certainly not at this scale, and not for so long. They are the loudest on almost all of the issues they raise despite claiming the opposite, just look at their Mastodon timeline. This coupled with like-minded trolls acting autonomously (see [14], noting the commenter's reputation and the date of registration) makes their project untouchable by anyone else.
So there you go. Let's hope GOS actually has evidence to show this time around.
N.B. Inevitably somebody will associate me with organisations/communities I'm not part of. They're wrong. I am also one of the targets of Kw Farms; I don't want anything with it and wish it (and people in there) didn't exist. I use F-Droid, just like many other GrapheneOS users, but that doesn't make me involved in their community; I also use Accrescent. And I honestly find /e/ to be simply bad OS, not just from privacy perspective.
I am using GrapheneOS on a Pixel, which is not sold here, and therefore had to be imported with the specific intent of flashing GOS on it. I've been using it for the past 4-5 years, during which I had the (dis)pleasure of occasionally checking their social media to see updates. If you wonder how I seem to know a lot of their past behaviours, this is why.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260708165246/https://grapheneo...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260708165735/https://grapheneo...
[2]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/115698255379468128
[3]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116835337586731444
[4]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116664053488539588
[5]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116302248111776763
[6]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116296896211404265
[7]: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand... "Once again personally targeting our founder with fabricated stories and harassment from their community is what /e/OS has done before and continues doing."
[8]: https://github.com/bromite/bromite/issues/2141
[9]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/115056172025799459
[10]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250819151705/https://tech.mich...
[11]: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/grapheneos.org/graphs/contribu...
[12]: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/hardened_malloc/graphs/contrib...
[13]: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues
[14]: https://www.ifixit.com/News/111634/why-the-fairphone-6-shoul...
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