The Statement

Preface

On April 20th of 2023, the Keyholder of the Quilt project attempted a hostile takeover of the Community and Toolchain Discord servers, as well as the Quilt Community Collab program (QCC) server. This document serves as a write-up on the events that led to the attempted takeover, the takeover itself, and where we plan to go from here.

This document also exists to give background on our collaboration status with Forge. A dedicated statement was planned to be released prior to the takeover happening, but given they ended up heavily intertwined, they have both been merged into this one.

The statement was written by more than 11 authors— please excuse us if you see discrepancies in writing styles.

Quilt Community Collab (QCC)

Quilt Community Collab was created on November 2nd, 2021 as a continuation of a similar project that had been founded on March 1st of the same year. The program exists to provide tooling and a collaborative space for people running Minecraft-related communities to work together on moderation, community management and event planning.

This collab program is occasionally misunderstood as a sort of "hit squad" attempting to "cancel" Minecraft community members and have them removed from as many servers as possible, largely due to rhetoric pushed by queerphobes, racists and other bigots that have been banned by communities taking part in the program. However, it does nothing of the sort — while communities there do occasionally mention bans that they've made, it primarily exists to support those communities in their community management work, on topics such as intersectionality, policy-writing and structural design. Even though bans can be shared there, other communities are not required to act, instead making their decision based on the provided evidence.

The program was created by the Quilt Community Team, but it contains members from several other founding communities — one of which was Forge. Everyone involved saw this as a sign of good things to come; Forge has been well-known for its toxic community management practices over the years, and Forge taking part in the program was interpreted as a genuine dedication to solving those issues. This wasn't an entirely incorrect assumption, but only in a broad sense — a lot of the changes were surface-level, and didn't really address many of the deeper, more serious problems, as we'll see later.

External users involved

Kashike, aka The Keyholder

Quilt, born from Fabric drama, has done its best to make sure no one person could take control of the server and become a dictator[1]. For this reason, the Quilt initiative members created the role of the Keyholder, someone who is well-known in the Minecraft community while being totally uninvolved in the project. The keyholder was supposed to never intervene in the management of the project[2].

Kashike was chosen to be the Quilt Keyholder by the founders of the project due to his involvement in various Minecraft projects, most of the time enacting this same role, or one with the same importance.[3][4]

IDs: 976461443580985425, 105923848263753728,[5] and 599644584611414033 (selfbot specific account, although his main has also been used to self bot)[6]

LexManos

LexManos, or Lex for short, was the leader of the Forge project from its conception in 2011, to April 5th, 2023, when he stepped down as a result of the discovery of several transphobic tweets he liked on Twitter — more on that later. As an extremely prominent member of the Minecraft modding community, we believe he needs no further introduction.

ID: 134030797756694528

Curle (also Amethyst)

Curle has been contributing to Forge for a few years, and has been informally holding management roles for a while now. While she is known for her poor moderation, such as repeatedly muting community members contacting the moderators, we didn't notice any overly problematic behavior up to that point.

ID: 462617385157787648

Larry

Larry was part of the first wave of new moderators in Quilt. He joined on the day of opening, April 20th, 2021,[7] and applied for the position of Moderator on May 14th, 2021,[8] with only 11 messages on the server thus far[9]. The first internal message in his application thread is a direct endorsement from Kashike: [10]

I can give a thumbs-up to Larry being someone trustworthy and good at moderation - I know him pretty well.

This contradicts the first requirement to be a Keyholder, according to RFC 7[2]:

Be able to show that they have no conflicting interests or personal wish to be in power

Since then, over the span of two whole years, Larry sent only 524 messages in total in our community spaces, including internal channels — 477 messages on the community server, and 47 in the Toolchain server[12]. For comparison, the median among the Community Team is 24,712, with the average being 45,620. For a more extreme comparison, the average message count, for every Discord member in the community server combined, is 1,038[13] — more than double of Larry's total.

ID: 347959633518002177

zml

zml participated to Quilt's founding through the Initiative server. She is mostly known for her work at Sponge. This lead her to have privileged access to the internal channels.

ID: 97139815404810240

Staff members involved

For context, here are the staff members involved:

• levi (also levy, remote_getaway): Moderator, Arab-South American PoC recently brought to the moderator team to help solve the longstanding lack of racial diversity in Quilt.
• gdude: Moderator and Community Manager, white European who has worked in Quilt since its inception.
• The Starchildren (also Hope, Akarys, Starchild): Community Manager and Administrative Board member, biracial European with a longstanding history with Quilt
• Bubblie (also bubs): Community Team member, Indian-American PoC.
• MrMangoHands (also mango): Community Manager and Administrative Board member, white US American, inactive for a few months and who was about to leave the staff team, holding a role similar to Keyholder in CaffeineMC.

Timeline

• February 2nd: First report of Lex's transphobic Twitter likes.
• February 25th: Curle discusses with Lex to "tone down the Twitter weirdness."
• April 1st: Second report of Lex's transphobic Twitter likes.
• April 5th: Curle tells QCC that she will be taking the lead on Forge.
• April 7th: Curle shows the first draft of their statements, and after some discussion tells Levi to "take his victim complex to another thread."
• April 12th: The beginning of Larry's demotion, marked by three events in quick succession:
  • Larry espouses a racist viewpoint and argues against Levi in a ModMail thread, immediately after dismissing reports against someone who harbored ableist and Islamophobic views. Kashike then intercepts the argument and sides with Larry, his personal friend.
  • A discussion is started in the #admins channel about starting a demotion against Larry, Kashike also joins this conversation.
  • A suggestion of minimum activity requirement for Moderators, Community Managers and Admins is brought up again (previously shelved as no consensus was found). Larry somehow learns about messages from the #admins channel where the suggestion is discussed, which he is not supposed to be able to see, and uses it to push against the new policy.
• April 13th: A demotion against Larry is started due to inactivity.
• April 15th: After 8 days of silence from Forge, the process to remove Forge from the Collab program is started.
• April 17th: Forge releases their statements. Noticing that Forge never addressed any feedback, the RFC that details the conditions of the voting process within QCC is simplified to make voting period end when the decision cannot be overturned, and the vote for Forge's removal passes. Forge is then removed from the program.
• April 18th: Forge member looking to apply at Quilt retracts their application due to "concerning reports." zml additionally posts a statement in Toolchain then leaves.
• April 19th: Larry posts a statement in both Community and Toolchain and leaves, somehow knowing about the demotion. Larry and zml reveal there is an active leaker who is conspiring with them.
• April 19th-20th: Kashike kicks out all the Community Team and Administrative Board members and seizes control of the servers, before transferring them to MrMangoHands upon pressure. All CT and Admin Board positions are reinstated, and Kashike, Larry, and zml are all permanently banned from Quilt spaces due to their role in the hostile takeover.

Forge

First Lex Report

On February 2nd, a thread was created on the QCC server titled "LexManos Twitter Activity", outlining how former Forge leader LexManos liked numerous transphobic tweets, by known bigoted accounts.[14]. One Forge staffer answered that they wanted to wait for Curle to do anything. The thread had been bumped up on the 5th, 9th (with a ping), 12th, and 14th before getting another reply from the same staffer claiming that "Lex isn't a transphobe."[15][16].

Curle finally responded on the 25th of February, saying she spoke to Lex, who will "tone down the Twitter weirdness." When prompted back with the idea that keeping his transphobia quiet wasn't what was asked, Curle answered combatively stating it was "drunken nights" behaviour, and the likes were to "elicit a reaction"[17]. No further action was taken by Forge.

Second Lex Report

On April 1st, the thread was re-opened and many more transphobic and alt-right likes were found on Lex's public Twitter.[18][19] Two server members, one from Quilt and one from another community, threatened to go public to make sure this behaviour was properly addressed[20].

On the 3rd, Lex removed his likes from the tweets, which was followed by the Forge staffer mentioned previously saying Curle was pressured to leave the Forge project by her employers, who noticed Lex's problematic liked tweets, which is what finally drove her to act[21]. Curle additionally tone-policed a member of the Quilt staff for "insulting" Lex by calling him a "man baby"[22].

It must be noted that Lex has openly stated that he "stands by everything [he has] ever 'liked' on social media."[23]

On the 5th, Curle revealed that she would be taking the lead on the Forge project. This change is welcomed by all present members, including the two members threatening to go public, telling Curle they would wait for the official statements from Forge, to avoid stressing out Forge members[24].

Feedback on the Forge Statements

On the 7th, Curle posted a draft of the two statements made by Forge with the following foreword: [25]

This is from Lex (specifically, from a huge wall of text dump), but I've redone the phrasing extensively because as discussed... he has a significant issue with wording and getting his intentions across.

The statements themselves didn't contain any disclosure of that information at the time.[26]

Considering the misleading aspect of hiding the fact Lex's statement had been edited, a few members raised concerns about the idea of not knowing what the original statement contained.[27] It was found later that the statement was initially written in the third person and that some sentences were randomly added, reinforcing the idea that Lex never wrote the statement himself or even any first draft.[28] Concerns were also brought up with the "sorry we got caught" aspect of the statement[29].

Levi was the first to raise those concerns, and as a member of the racial minorities targeted by Lex's likes, he expressed his desire to see the unmodified statement.[30] Curle responded that this attitude lacked "professionalism" (For more explanation about the racism behind this statement, please see the "Professionalism and Racism section) and was "getting inflammatory".[31]

Levi and another Quilt staff member left the conversation. After this, Bubblie, another person of colour in Quilt's Community Team, spoke about the recurrent issue of white people leaving conversations when people of colour mention racial issues, as well as constant issues with getting tone policed. Levi agreed, which caused Curle to send the following message: [32]

Why are you playing the race card all of a sudden? Take your victim complex to another thread please.

We don't believe we need to explain how this is blatantly racist, but for the sake of explanations: People of colour are usually left to resolve issues they did not bring up or started, and this was simply a note taken on how the conversation had ended, nothing more than a passing comment. It was never pinned against Curle, but her immediate reaction to seeing people of colour complain about effort-in-labor bias was to say they had a "victim complex", thus posing their exhaustion as fake or an exaggeration.

DM hopping

After walking out of the conversation without offering either an apology or an explanation for her comment, Curle went into Levi's DMs to offer an apology, and saying it should be “discussed directly”.[75]

Levi invited Curle to say their piece, but mentioned that he did not want to engage in a discussion as there was nothing to debate about. Curle said she respected that decision, but then went on to lie on the “LexManos Twitter Activity” thread, saying her message had been “rejected”.[77]

Curle then proceeded to complain to gdude, a white man, in DMs about being “highly concerned” with the behaviours Bubblie and Levi exhibited, claiming nobody was “willing to listen”, and that she believed if she expressed her concerns on them, she'd be labelled “a white supremacist”.[76]

gdude repeatedly mentioned how Curle's venting and demands for clarification made him uncomfortable, and that he was not going to be speaking for people of colour. Curle, disregarding this, continued sending long paragraphs calling Levi “argumentative”, “inappropriate”, that his interpretation of her message as racist was “a conscious choice”, and ultimately putting the blame on him by saying he was “probing for that” to happen.

Curle then claimed the moderation team was “reprehensible” for calling out her racist comment, but not calling Levi out on his tone. She states, again, that Bubblie and Levi are “unprofessional, directly accusatory and argumentative”, and that moderators have a conflict of interest for letting it happen.

As this was happening, the “LexManos Twitter Activity” thread took a civil disobedience stance given the behaviour exhibited by Curle was heavily dismissive, stating that if she was not going to answer, continue eluding everyone's feedback and criticism, and lying about what her DMs stated, then the thread had no purpose, and they could go as off-topic as they wanted. This was agreed to by most participants of the thread.

Curle, noticing this, goes on to complain in gdude's DMs once again, trying to pose the people of colour in the thread making reclaiming jokes as a bad thing, and calling the behaviour “wrong” and “disgusting”. We must highlight again that Curle is a white woman, and she has no say in or right to call out people of colour on how they approach reclamation.[76]

She complains that no one reached out to her when she was “making a racist outburst, seemingly out of character”, again notes that Bubblie and Levi were being “aggressive”, “insensitive”, “unapologetic”, and are “unsuitable for the collab program”, then passively calls them “immature, insensitive, or unsuitable for reasonable conversation”. She states that her racism is just her “concerns and thoughts” being “twisted”, and “mental gymnastics”, and Bubblie and Levi are “explicitly searching for reasons to be hurt or insulted”.

Curle then went on to face gdude with a questionnaire that goes as follows:

• “Is levy's behaviour acceptable, in your opinion?”— The answer was just yes
• Questioning why the thread was “not moderated”.— “it's civil disobedience”
• Implying the moderation team has some sort of conflict of interest when it comes to “moderating levy and bubble's behaviour”— The answer is no.
• Questioning why no one reached out to her after her racist statement.— “there is no context that would make that statement OK”. Curle pushes this topic, saying “it can be completely out of line and still have reasons, intents, history, and emotion behind it”.
• Asks why was “bad faith” not shot down, and implies the moderation team is scared of moderating Bubblie and Levi.— “nobody is unbiased”.

She claims bubblie and Levi get "preferential privilege", and that gdude is "isolating minority groups" by listening to them on racial topics. She goes on to ask him to "treat everybody equally" and "not give people preferential treatment because of the circumstances of their birth"

Curle requests to be educated by gdude, again, a white man, on the topic of racism. gdude states he is not comfortable with this, and offers Curle asking Levi directly.

Curle says she needs time away, and this is the last time she is seen.

Removal from the Program

Between the 7th of April, the day of Curle's last message in the QCC, to the 15th, no Forge member attempted to address any of the concerns raised by anyone from any other community.

Given that Forge was evidently not willing to cooperate and collaborate within the QCC program, a call for Forge's removal from the program was started on the 15th and scheduled to end on the 24th, under the following clause for possible removal of communities from the program: [33]

Substantiated concerns regarding a community's staff teams perpetuating harmful behaviour — such as paedophilia, physical violence, or ableism, racism, transphobia or other bigotry.

While we were aware of the stress Curle was under to write a statement and assist Lex in writing his own statement, such heavy concerns and disregard to address it in a space this sensitive was unacceptable, and it clearly seems that no further attempts were made to seek critical feedback, despite our own concerns.

The statements[34][35] were released on the 17th of April. Noticing how our concerns were mainly brushed off, we looked into the RFCs to determine if there was a way to remove Forge earlier. Critically, a removal vote cannot be vetoed, meaning that once enough votes are cast, the results cannot change. Out of all three voting communities, one already voted positive, and only one more positive vote was needed to seal the results. Quilt's voting period was scheduled to end on April 22nd, which would push the vote to a pass.

Given the RFC never mentioned anything about what happens when the vote results are sealed but the voting period has yet to end, we added a clause to better define that[36]. Keep in mind that clause cannot change a vote result — it can only make the vote effects act earlier. Given how minor the RFC was, and the sufficient community team approval (including one from an uninvolved Administrative Board member), the RFC was merged. Shortly after, the third community involved gave a vote of agreement, leading to the prompt removal of Forge from the Quilt Community Collab program.[37][38]

We would like to mention that across 3 different organizations, 26 people voted in favor of the removal, 1 explicitly abstained and no one voted against it. This vote was not contentious by any metrics, even outside of Quilt. The vote ended before Quilt even cast its vote; the other two communities had already voted toward removal.[39]

Our take on Forge

Curle's denial of the implicit bigotry she continues to perpetuate has led us to believe that Forge, under her leadership, cannot continue to pursue the goals Quilt and all our affiliated communities in the QCC program strive to achieve, most notably of safety and equity for all.

As such, we have cut ties with Forge, and we recommend our vulnerable users to stay away from Forge-run spaces — racial bigotry can never be actively addressed and eliminated in a space if said space's leader denies their racist beliefs.

Larry

While this section seems unrelated to the previous events, there is in fact a deeper connection and we would heavily encourage you to read on.

The ModMail

On the 11th, a community member opened a ModMail thread to report off-server behaviour containing islamophobia, 9/11 jokes, autism mockery, and other issues. Moderators internally discussed an intent to ban, but no one ended up actioning the ban or responding at the time.[40]

The following day, Larry unilaterally decided to not ban and replied as such to the reporter, notably without any discussion with the rest of the moderation team.[41] Levi responded internally that this wasn't the correct course of action, as the content was obviously Islamophobic. Larry continued to defend his action saying it was off-server behaviour and "just a kid", and therefore not worth actioning, which goes against our principle of defensive moderation against any potential bad actors who can endanger our community[42]. Two other moderators agreed with levi while Larry continued to push back, despite going completely against the said principle.[43][44]

In the process, Larry made some other deeply concerning statements, such as calling Levi's experience with bigotry "epistemic privilege",[45] tone policing him, claiming he was arguing in bad faith,[46] insisting on using the word "privileged" despite Levi's request not to and went as far as comparing Levi to colonisers[47].

Kashike's intervention

Even though the Keyholder is allowed to "oversee the community team in their actions and processes, and provide opinions and feedback if they wish", according to RFC 7, they must factor in any conflicts of interest that may arise before voicing their opinion. Yet, Kashike entered the conversation to defend his friend in a direct demonstration of favouritism and conflict of interest: [48]

Forgive my rough words here, but this entire conversation is fucked up on multiple levels. What I do know for a fact is that some of the comments levy was making towards larry in here earlier were not warranted. I will not stand by and be quiet when things like this happen.

Kashike continued to tone police Levi to defend the racist points on his friends, which is both a conflict of interest and generally unacceptable. Similar to Curle, Kashike then moved to gdude's DMs to tone police Levi even more and go as far as claiming he should apologise. Kashike asked gdude to send a message in the #managers channel saying that he got contacted by someone for the discussion, failing to disclose that this person is Larry, one of the involved parties[49][50]. Kashike then continued to push for the admins to ask Levi to apologise to his friend as he got contacted by this same friend who was "concerned": [51]

I usually don't say much in conversations, but for the one in question I was contacted privately due to what was going on

Once again, Kashike made it seem like he got contacted by another staff member, and failed to disclose his conflict of interest and that Larry was the person who contacted him.

Low activity requirement guidelines

Considering how out of touch with the community Larry was, the Starchildren decided to action an item that have been on their to-do list for twelve days at the time: talk about introducing a low activity requirement for Moderators, Community Managers and Administrative Board members[52]. Later in the day, they mentioned in #managers that they were going to talk to Larry about his future at Quilt if no one was opposed to the policy. Kashike answered with:

... how does that make sense to do at all?

They clarified that while the guidelines weren't made especially to remove Larry, they could also be used as such[53]. Somehow at the same moment, Larry learned about that message in #managers, a channel he could not have read[54], while gdude got a complaint in DMs from Kashike at the same time[55]. Larry accused the Starchildren of coming after them, after which the Starchildren clarified that while Larry's behaviour prompted them to fast forward the policy work, they were not looking to get them out but rather talk, as otherwise, a demotion would have already been in progress. Larry then revealed he abused a misconfiguration of PluralKit, an accessibility tool, to read the private channel[54]. When asked who this misconfiguration was reported to, Larry answered Kashike, who did absolutely nothing to try to fix it or warn the Managers, the ones responsible for fixing this sort of issue. The Keyholder isn't supposed to do anything[56].

In parallel, the Starchildren clarified the same thing in the #managers channel. Kashike responded with the following message: [53]

I'm going to go do something relaxing for a while - getting involved in things, when I usually don't, has made me a bit stressed out. Feel free to ping/message me if necessary, though. Hugs to anyone who wants one.

Kashike didn't send any other message before taking over the servers.

Larry's Demotion

Due to Larry's concerning behaviour with the PluralKit leaks, the Starchildren decided to move directly to a demotion against him on the 14th. [57]

Larry hasn't been inactive at all in Quilt those past few months. In total, Larry has about 500 messages on both servers combined. From November 2022 to April 2023, Larry has respectively sent the following number of messages: 32, 2, 7, 18, 3, 8. Considering Larry has been inactive since Quilt's inception, I don't consider him legitimate to hold the moderation powers given to him.

This has recently been characterised by a few events, most notably the non-profit discussions where he made non-sensical, totally out of touch comments, and the [name redacted] thread where he immediately attacked levy in bad faith, accompanied with some pretty racist takes.

No disagreement was voiced during the 6 days this vote went on for. It didn't have a chance to go through however, as he left the server on the 20th, after sending a paragraph you may read below in "Larry (part 2)".

zml

On the 18th of April, zml sent the following message in the internal #dev-office channel in the Toolchain Discord server, which only the Quilt Developers, along with the Community Team and the Administrative Board, can view, and then left all Quilt-affiliated spaces:

hey gang, with some of the recent events i'm rather dissatisfied with the way quilt has been going, and i'm afraid I don't have strong hopes for a future for this project. I've discussed some of these things with others, but putting it out there, some of the thoughts i've had recently:

- The division between the community team's side of the project and the development teams has created fragmented planning and memberships, where the community has developed fairly divergently from the way the development sides work, and there is friction where some community team members believe that they are in some way able to overrule developers, rather than being equals in one project.

- Your moderation strategies feel super reactionary -- between only bring up policy when it's convenient to obstruct the work of others, and your swift removal of Forge from the community collab server (and all quilt spaces following) as soon as they failed to meet your expectations on their beliefs. We all say dumb things, are raised with 'bad' beliefs, and are here to learn and grow -- try to support that rather than punishing.

- A lot of the development team is burnt out, and the isolation of the toolchain discord makes it difficult to attract new contributors from ideal candidates who might be intimidated by joining an entirely separate guild. it's a bit of a vicious cycle at this point, but I hope you can break out (be kind to yourselves, devs)

- Levy, I would like to think there are good points in a lot of what you say, but every time someone crosses you whether it's one of your colleagues here in staff or other community members, it feels like you lash out in a way that helps you unload, but isn't very productive in building up relationships with other staff and the management of other communities

- Hope and the other Starchildren, your overly legalistic beliefs about this project's management and infrastructure goals out of line with other far larger organizations in the community have burdened everyone else on staff. Please stop.

- g, I think what you've created in quilt community is an interesting perspective on building a community and has succeeded more than i would have expected, but it doesn't seem to have meshed super well with the development work that is essential to keeping the project relevant, and i'd think would have trouble scaling to cast the broad tent initially imagined for Quilt. It really feels like you are trying to do some level of catching like, pre-crime that is a bad road to be on.

- For all of you, please take time and try to have your own conversations with people involved in situations, try to avoid just hopping on the bandwagon for votes (and maybe don't short-circuit votes where nothing about the situation at hand will change).

with that, i wish you all well on your projects and hope that despite my expectations Quilt can turn things around -- feel free to reach out to me if you wish to talk further (tho as always my availability is a touch limited, responses may be delayed). with that i'm out :)

The first and third points are decent arguments about the split between the development and community aspects of the project, which is something that we were actively working on and has only been delayed by those events.

The second and sixth points are simply a fundamental misinterpretations of what moderation is for, catching problems before they happen. We don't have to wait for someone to hurt our sensitive users before acting.

The fourth point about levi is simply tone policing.

The fifth point is simply nonsensical, the Starchildren handle legal at Quilt and will therefore adopt a legal viewpoint. Their real life job is also infrastructure work, they should have the qualifications (and the authority, as the Infrastructure Lead) to set the project's goals.

The seventh point probably refers to Forge, despite the vote being called by two communities other than Quilt. As outlined previously, the short-circuit clause couldn't have changed the result of the vote.

Considering we know she was "conspiring"[69] with Kashike and Larry, we can only assume this message has been written in bad faith.

Larry (part 2)

Larry left all servers late on the 19th, leaving the following message in both the Toolchain and Community servers:

Hey @everyone,

Just want to say first of all, I appreciate everyone's efforts to make Quilt safe and productive. With that, I'm resigning as a moderator.

I hope you take the time to read what I'm going to say, instead of dismissing it as a "whole load of nothing". Despite my lack of chatting time in the Quilt servers, I've spent the last 2 years lurking every important thread and channel, watching and learning.

1. I suppose this is a good spot to express my displeasure at being voted out on the basis of lies by Hope. I know about the vote, but more importantly I know about the reasons provided for the vote. I did not "immediately attack levy in bad faith." It's a shame that here, where Hope was biased, I didn't get a chance to defend myself at all. To be clear, levy immediately attacked me, and I know that everyone knows it was him who reacted (at best) suboptimally. I cannot emphasize how degrading it is to have someone who claims to be racially sensitive along with an entire staff team try to treat me differently because of my race (regardless of what that race is) or claim that I'm a bigot. I'm not - I literally just called out persistent bullshit. Gdude, your siding with levy on that issue displays a huge amount of unwarranted bias. There's a difference between respectability politics and treating others as lesser, and levy consistently treated me as a lesser, which you just reinforced. I think you're consistently letting your biases blind you to situations that would otherwise be unacceptable, even to you. At least, I hope so, because otherwise you just don't see (or worse, do see and don't care) how bad some of the stuff that you allow is.

2. Hope, I'm sorry that my arguments against your registering Quilt solely under your name as a legal entity in France made you upset. They should not be used against me - just because you disagree with me, doesn't make all of my comments out-of-touch or baseless. If people can't disagree with you without getting 'marked' as an enemy and then voted out because of that disagreement, you're fostering hostility within the staff team. Perhaps this is a warning to everyone else; don't get on Hope's bad side or disagree or you'll be voted out!

3. Levy, your racial aggrievedness is not an excuse to be a jerk. That's what you do when anyone gets on your bad side - you're a jerk, and it's not okay. Please don't take this as an attack, but there are infinitely less destructive (or, imagine, constructive!) ways to handle people that you think are uneducated. Assuming they're either racist or an idiot is the wrong assumption to start off with. Just going after them and their character doesn't even help you with anything other than perhaps feeling or looking more like a victim of society. And sure, you (maybe me too!) are a victim of society. Making that your grounds for attacking others is illegitimate. I know this will probably be dismissed, but I want nothing more than to see you grow out of the looking-for-blood attitude you go into conversations with. It'd be a benefit for everyone.

4. zml was here when Quilt started. zml actually helped to create Quilt, and y'all not knowing her is a shame. Assuming she's racist, leaving because she doesn't support racial diversity efforts, is really stupid. looks to me that she left because, like me, she can't believe some of the things that are allowed to go on. There's a huge difference between pushing for racial diversity and treating levy's word as infallible, and attacking the same people that levy attacks just because levy attacks them.

5. To everyone else, thank you again for your dedication to being good people and making a good community. I appreciate it. Be careful not to buy into what others say just because they're good - form your own views and openly disagree when you see something unjust or plain stupid. That's how communities grow. Also, the leaks indicate a lack of trust in the system and its leaders. Work on that, y'all?

Besides the pettiness of the @everyone pings and leaving before the vote goes through, let's break down those points one by one:

1. As you could previously see, the demotion was about inactivity, a fact by all metrics shown previously. If Larry actually waited, according to the process he would have been offered to submit a counter-argument, which is a direct way of defending yourself[58]. The double standard is impressive when it comes to the accusation of bias, considering his undisclosed friendship with Kashike[10]. The fact that the rest of the Community Team agreed with gdude that levi's behavior was acceptable shows there is no actual conflict of interest.
2. Again, Larry's demotion started because of his inactivity[52]. The argument of the non-profit was brought up as Larry claimed there was no need for a legal entity, showing a clear lack of knowledge of months of previous struggles due to not having one. Other disagreements with the proposal weren't factored into the demotion. This argument also disregards the democratic aspect of Quilt; no one individual is able to decide who can leave and who can stay[57][58].
3. This point just comes off as extremely tone-policing and condescending. Saying that an actual victim of racism is trying to make himself look like a victim is sickening.
4. As you could see in the previous section, calling out zml for racism was and still is accurate.
5. There isn't much to say about this point, other than the group of three racists working together is hardly a demonstration of any failure.

Overall this post is crippled with tone-policing paternalist points and false truths and clearly demonstrates the racism and bad faith that characterized his previous interactions.

The Hostile Takeover

Kashike takes control of the server

A few hours after Larry left, Kashike used a self-bot to kick all the staff members and bots[59] from the servers and deleted all webhooks[60]. He posted the same message in all news channels: [61]

This project has become controlled by a community moderation team that focuses their energy on finding ways to attack others, which is too dark an irony for my tastes considering this project's origin. In recent times, this moderation team has gone on a quest to personally attack community members and in the past has even doxxed individual's IRL information to justify bans.

Per RFC 7, which grants me independent oversight powers to prevent exactly this sort of situation, I am freezing this discord server while we figure out what to do next, and I make this offer to the development team:

* If you wish to continue working on the projects without the previous moderation staff, we can consider rebranding the project while focusing on releasing a quality product, and can use the Toolchain discord to facilitate that, so the teams remain together.

* If you wish to stay with the moderation team that has stated they outrank you, you are entitled to do that.

I'm not going to pressure anyone on this decision, and I am sorry that it has come to this.

We will break down the first paragraph in a bit, but we first want to emphasise that Kashike had absolutely no authority in doing this. The existence of the Keyholder was made especially to avoid a hostile takeover, which Kashike undoubtedly knew, considering his involvement in Quilt's inception. Quoting the same RFC 7 Kashike mentions: [2]

A keyholder is a democratically elected member of the community that otherwise has no direct involvement or stake in the management of the community. By electing an otherwise unrelated party to be a keyholder, it's hoped that the Quilt community spaces can avoid the issue of a community leader gone rogue - it should prevent an abuse of power from giving someone total control over any community space, at least as far as is possible.

While it is true the RFC says "they're also welcome to oversee the community team in their actions and processes, and provide opinions and feedback if they wish", this isn't a free pass to override all our democratic processes.

Kashike also tries with this message to jeopardize the project and claim it for his own. He did not attempt to contact anyone whatsoever before doing so.

The Developers' Reaction

After posting his announcement, Kashike pinged all the developers asking for questions or comments. Three developers immediately pushed back and mentioned that he also kicked developers by kicking the moderation team. Kashike responded that they can rejoin at any time, although he never actually gave back the roles necessary to view the channel, to which the developer answered that he "could have discussed before kicking them"[62]. Two others developers then proceeded to derail the conversation by talking about water, and Kashike was promptly ignored until the server got restored[63].

The Community's Reaction

It is hard to grasp the reaction of a large community over multiple hours, so we encourage you to go read the conversations below this message on the community server for the full context. Outside of a few people who wanted to hear more from Kashike, a very large number of people condemned Kashike's behaviour and wanted to see the server returned to its rightful owners, the Community Team.

We will note that one death threat made by a community member was immediately called out by the rest of the chat and the moderation team, and the person who made it was subsequently banned by Kashike with support from gdude and MrMangoHands[64].

The Recovery Server

A temporary server was made by the Community Team to gather staff and some community members. Since people left between when the servers got restored and this statement being written, we don't have the exact count, but we know the server had at least 3 admins, 14 staffers and 20 community members[65], all in disagreement with Kashike's actions.

The Group DM

Kashike asked gdude to create a group DM with himself and all the other admins, except for the Starchildren, who he explicitly requested be excluded. Inside the DMs, Kashike repeated that he didn't want the Starchildren and Levi inside the group DM, despite the former being a part of the Administrative Board and the latter not even being on said board[66]. He later claimed that he was discussing with the entire admin board[67], failing to disclose he didn't include the only coloured administrator, another example of Kashike's racist prejudices.

gdude opened by asking why Kashike sees "leaking or leaving a vulnerable community without moderators as any kind of solution." He promptly ignored the major safety concern raised by gdude to talk about his grievances with the Community Team.[68]

While we won't talk about everything that happened in those DMs (they span more than 25 desktop screens) for the sake of keeping this statement digestible, we want to talk about a few of the accusations being made.

Kashike attempted to call out zml and Larry's messages as being unfairly dismissed, which makes sense considering they were "conspiring together."[69].

The "Doxxing" Accusations

This is the only accusation Kashike made public, without any authorization from anyone in the team despite claiming so: back in December 22, 2021, a year and a half ago, gdude investigated reports from a member of the Quilt Community Collab about another member who was accused of having sexually harassed them. Due to the complexity of the situation and gdude's memory impairment, he made an internal thread to track his "research" into the accusations. Gdude had, actually, received court documents from the victim, but had been asked to not say so outright to protect the victim. As such, the thread was largely an attempt to create a paper trail that could reasonably lead to the victim-provided documents[71].

This thread was private to the moderation team and was never going to be public: this wasn't a doxx, everything stayed completely internal. However, Kashike had the following to say: [72]

I shared that thread with external community members and leaders, and all of them said the same thing (roughly): it is completely unacceptable to do something like that, and is not something that should be permitted in any community

Taking an export of an internal thread and sharing it with third parties without any authorization from the victim is, on the other hand, doxxing, perpetrated by Kashike. He also waited more than a year and a half to kick the Community Team and discuss that thread, which he could have done anytime prior, especially considering he participated in that thread himself[73]. We can only imagine this is a pretext to cover his defense of his friend being removed from the staff.

It is also a breach of the European General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), as the accuser's and accusee's personal data was being shared widely without any legal basis.

Recovering the Servers

After waking up, the Starchildren, the legal handlers of Quilt, requested to be added to the group DM, which Kashike complied with. (note: this happened in Kashike's personal server which we can't access anymore, sorry we cannot provide any screenshots)

Once the Starchildren were added, Kashike stated the following: [70]

The discussion in here have been good so far - all I ask is that anyone in here leave any swearing, threats, etc behind. People know me to be professional, and I don't want things to end badly here at all.

This is quite ironic, as he himself has done the most unprofessional act possible that is this hostile takeover, not to mention how tone-deaf it was to say that to a group of hurt individuals.

After the Starchildren had pointed out the legal issues, the lack of authority Kashike needed to justify his actions, the optics of kicking everyone out and seeking a new moderation team, and the total disapproval from the developers and the community, Kashike finally backed out and gave ownership of the servers to MrMangoHands.[74]

Mango then gave the Community Manager role back to the other active Managers and proceeded to go to bed. They continued recovering the servers by reassigning the staff roles, adding back the bots and repairing all the other damages done by Kashike.

To this day, Mango still acts as a temporary Keyholder while we find another solution (see "Alternatives for the Keyholder System" section). In light of the leaks, conspiring[69] and hostile takeovers, Kashike, Larry and zml have been indefinitely banned from all Quilt spaces.

Our take on Kashike

This day, Kashike has shown that he is completely unable to act as an impartial Keyholder for any project and will not hesitate to abuse this role and take over the server to serve his own interests. He has also shown that he cannot be trusted with access to sensitive information, as he will happily leak information to third parties and damage the project.

We would like to suggest to communities who still trust Kashike to reconsider their relationships with him in light of those events.

What's next?

The Rendering Collab

Quilt was also involved in another collaborative project: a rendering API which was meant to be a successor to both the Fabric Renderer API and FREX. The project originated as a proposal from Quilt to adopt FREX and integrate it as part of the Quilt Standard Libraries, as the maintainer of FREX, Grondag, no longer had enough time to work on it. Work was already put in FREX to allow it to be used on Forge and Fabric, which led to the question: do we keep that?

Given the existence of Quilt Community Collab and the relatively healthy relationship between Quilt and Forge at the time, we contacted several communities to propose to work on a common rendering API: Render Wagon. The project had made theoretical progress and serves as a general direction for us to follow.

Following what happened with Forge in Quilt Community Collab, and Forge's rendering technical representative leaving the project due to personal reasons, we no longer see any point in keeping this collaboration alive. Without a Forge representative, any work done with Forge would be pointless and morally questionable given past events.

Quilt will likely absorb Render Wagon once more, likely as part of Quilt Standard Libraries, though details have not yet been determined.

Alternatives for the Keyholder System

As these events have shown, having an impartial Keyholder seems impossible, and thus we have created a proposal for a replacement. If you'd like to voice your opinion, you are more than welcome to in the corresponding meta thread on the community server.

The Future of Quilt

What does this effectively change for Quilt? Not much, really. All we learned through those events is that the Keyholder system is inherently broken and needs replacing. While zml, Larry and Kashike might have probably provided some interesting feedback, they are drowned in a sea of internalized and externalized racism making most, if not all, of their points null and void.

Additionally, through this incident, the importance of diversity in community management has been made clearer than ever: it revealed to us the direct harm of the lack of racial diversity that Quilt, together with some parts of the wider community, face — we had been unknowingly harbouring racists for years, and instead of learning from minority voices, they were willing to take drastic measures such as planning and attempting a coup, all to defend their malignant beliefs that have only recently been challenged. (See the "Importance of Diversity in Community Management" section for more information on the topic)

If you have some feedback for us that isn't about tone policing minorities, you are more than welcome to reach out to a Community Manager or a member of the Administrative Board. We would like to remind you that no action will be taken against someone providing feedback in good faith. You can even send us an email at feedback@quiltmc.org with a throwaway account if you'd like to provide anonymous feedback.

Additional explanations

Importance of Diversity in Community Management

Bigotry in a community can manifest itself in several ways — either visibly and prominently as slurs, insults, harmful stereotypes, threats of violence, etc., or more subtly in the form of co-opting, dogwhistling, gaslighting, unequal representation, or identity erasure.

While the former can usually be readily handled by a homogeneous moderation team, the latter can slip past moderation by appearing to be inconspicuous or insignificant to the white, cisgender, male, heterosexual majority of the anglophone Minecraft community.

It is therefore imperative for people who have minority safety in mind to associate themselves with actual minorities, and let them partake in the moderation and management of their community. It is easier for a trans person to identify transphobic dogwhistles than cis people, in the same vein that a person of colour can more readily detect racist sentiments, rhetoric and stereotypes than white people.

In other words, a community's leadership must be diverse, to properly recognize as many kinds of bigotry as possible, and protect as many different minority groups as possible.

While LGBTQ+ groups are generally better represented these days in the communities we associate with, we would like to call for other communities to join us in our effort to push for diversity in other frontiers — most notably in racial and ethnic diversity. The events that transpired over the past two months have shown us that racism and white privilege are still very much alive and well in parts of the wider community, and our efforts must continue.

Professionalism and Racism

It is often difficult for a person of colour to safeguard themself from [micro/macroaggressions], especially when they are one of the few racialized people in their working environment - and yet, they must in order to not become the “problem” or “angry” one in the work environment — unfortunately common stereotypes for people of colour.

Protecting oneself against everyday microaggressions in a system that already establishes whiteness as the precedent in professional spaces can feel like a lose-lose situation.

While many workplaces purport values of diversity and inclusion, these measures tend to be shallow. Addressing the emotional needs of workers and mitigating workplace hostilities can be a time costly endeavour, and can deter from the productivity of the workplace.

We then see that it is in the best interests of a company to instead neutralize the situation, but this often means protecting the aggressor as opposed to the individual or group on the receiving end of a derogatory act or comment.

So, if not asked formally by their employer, POC tend to understand and are conditioned to push down their emotions and feelings in the interest of a cohesive work environment.

White professional spaces can thus be an isolating environment for POC.

A note about the GDPR

All evidence in this thread may contain personal data that we collected on the basis of a legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)). We believe that shedding light on these events serves the public interest. Given the names and personal data needed to make this piece informative in certain sections, we have done our best to balance the value of the public interest and safeguards provided by the GDPR. If you have any questions or would like to exercise your rights, feel free to reach out at privacy@quiltmc.org.

References

1. Discussion of the Keyholder role on Initiative - Screenshot
2. Keyholder section of the RFC 7 - https://github.com/QuiltMC/rfcs/blob/c671574350ed1142278f24078e9eddc68884955f/structure/0007-community-team.md#keyholders
3. Prospector's formal motion to make Kashike the Keyholder - Screenshot
4. i5 saying Kashike would be in trouble if he took control of the servers - Screenshot
5. The riley account sending his own tweet - Screenshot
6. Kashike adding his selfbot and kicking it afterwards - Screenshot
7. Larry joining on the 20th of April 2021 - Screenshot
8. Larry's vote - Screenshot
9. Searching for Larry's messages before the 4th of April 2021 - Screenshot
10. Beginning of Larry's application - Screenshot
11. Searching for Larry's messages - Community & Toolchain
12. Statistics of all messages sent by the Quilt Community Team since 30th of October 2021 - Screenshot
13. Average message count Metabase question (may fluctuate) - http://stats-quilt.gserv.me/public/question/af2be563-d010-43be-bb7c-382973faf552
14. Beginning of the "LexManos Twitter Activity" thread - Screenshot
15. Lack of response from Forge - Screenshot
16. Forge's initial response - Screenshot
17. Curle's first response - Screenshot
18. Second Twitter report - Screenshot
19. Archive of Lex's Twitter - https://archive.ph/OGEwA
20. Threats to go public with Lex's tweets - Screenshot
21. Curle getting pressured by her employers - Screenshot
22. Bubblie calling Lex a "man baby" and Curle tone policing him - Screenshot
23. Lex saying he stands by what he liked - Screenshot
24. Curle announcing that Lex will step down - Screenshot
25. Curle posts the draft of the announcement - Screenshot
26. The version of the statements that were shared with Collab - https://gist.github.com/TheCurle/c9410dcc1183c132540bdec38a232e26/6062d8063b4039f375e081da06694a978f9d2ee0
27. Collab members being unhappy about the rephrasing not being mentioned - Screenshot
28. Statement edit history - https://gist.github.com/TheCurle/c9410dcc1183c132540bdec38a232e26/revisions (https://archive.ph/KJ0oU)
29. Concerns with the approach taken by the statements - Screenshot
30. Levi saying he cannot good faith Lex - Screenshot
31. Curle's first racist comment - Screenshot
32. Curle's second racist comment - Screenshot
33. Call to remove Forge from Collab - Screenshot
34. Curle's Statement - https://blog.minecraftforge.net/personal/curle/promotion/
35. Lex's Statement - https://blog.minecraftforge.net/personal/lex/twitter/
36. RFC 0062: Add a clause to call votes early - https://github.com/QuiltMC/rfcs/pull/76
37. Proof of vote from community A - Proof
38. Proof of vote from community B - Proof
39. Quilt's vote - Screenshot
40. Moderators agreeing internally to ban - Screenshot
41. Larry's answer to the report - Screenshot
42. Levi's comment and Larry's response - Screenshot
43. gdude calling out Larry for not following moderation policies - Screenshot
44. Another moderator agreeing with levi - Screenshot
45. Larry claiming levi is privileged for having experienced racism - Screenshot
46. Larry claiming levi is arguing in bad faith - Screenshot
47. Larry comparing levi to colonialists - Screenshot
48. Kashike stepping into the ModMail - Screenshot
49. Kashike's DM conversation with gdude - Screenshot
50. gdude's message in the `#managers` channel - Screenshot
51. Kashike saying he was contacted privately - Screenshot
52. Initial proposal for the low activity requirements - Screenshot
53. The Starchildren talk about how Larry should get talked to if the guidelines get implemented - Screenshot
54. Larry attacking the Starchildren on the policy - Screenshot
55. Kashike DMing gdude complaining about the Starchildren's response to Larry - Screenshot
56. Larry saying he reported the exploit to Kashike, which he didn't fix - Screenshot
57. Larry's demotion - Screenshot
58. Removing team members section of the RFC 7 - https://github.com/QuiltMC/rfcs/blob/c671574350ed1142278f24078e9eddc68884955f/structure/0007-community-team.md#process-removing-team-members
59. Kashike kicking bots and staff members - Screenshot
60. Kashike deleting all webhooks - Screenshot
61. Kashike's takeover announcement - Screenshot
62. Developers responding to Kashike - Screenshot
63. Developers derailing the conversation - Screenshot
64. gdude and MrMangoHands telling Kashike to ban the user who made death threats - Screenshot
65. Role tab of the recovery server - Screenshot
66. Kashike requesting that the Starchildren and levi aren't added to the group DM - Screenshot
67. Kashike claiming he's discussing with the entire Administrative Board - Screenshot 1 & Screenshot 2
68. Kashike not caring about vulnerable users - Screenshot
69. zml addmitting to be "conspiring" with Larry and Kashike - Screenshot
70. Kashike's message after adding the Starchildren - Screenshot
71. gdude's response to the accusation - Screenshot
72. Kashike admitting to doxxing the victim himself - Screenshot
73. Kashike actively participating in the thread - Screenshot
74. Kashike giving up and offering a transfer - Screenshot
75. Curle's DMs with levi - Screenshot
76. Curle's DMs with gdude - Screenshot
77. Curle saying levi refusing any clearing up - Screenshot