For me this started exactly here: Is this really a good way to manage Godot’s social media?
The moment when people were blocked for normal comments. The moment when forum threads were flagged and hidden without any reason. The moment when people were silenced/banned on the official Discord server for bringing up anything related to the topic. The moment when the Discord server invite link was disabled/deleted without any announcement, statement or warning. All of this goes completely against the Godot Foundation key policies , yet it happened, and instead of resolving the situation, the Godot officials kept pouring oil into the fire.
There were so many chances to stop for a moment and respond with something like “oh it indeeds look like we might have made a mistake, we’ll investigate and handle that asap!” for everyone: the moderators, the CoC team and especially the Community Manager. What happened instead? More blocks, more bans, more provocations, attacks and hate - all while the project officials kept silent and more and more people were blocked on all channels.
I sent an email to all CoC team members and received no response. The only official response was that statement by the Godot Foundation, way too late without responding to the actual concerns.
I’m totally fine with the project being inclusive. I also don’t care if they spread that message through official channels if they think they can deal with the consequences. What I’m not fine with is banning people for questioning that in a normal way.
Yes, some people are problematic - we all know that. Yes - the bans on Github were clearly justified. Still, Godot is a community effort after all, and that only works if people can talk to each other without having to fear to receive a ban for their opinion. And this fear was fueled by very bad management and moderation decisions the past days.
Thinking just 1 year back, Unity announced the runtime fee, and received the probably biggest shit storm in gaming history. We called them out on their official channels, forum, Discord, Twitter, Reddit, … - did they ever try to silence us? No. They took the feedback, stayed professional and approached their community in the end. Yet the Godot Foundation (with imo much higher ethical requirements and the absolute need to maintain a healthy community) can’t do that? What to hire a Community Manager for then if not to manage the community?
I don’t see Godot just as a tool. If it was, one could easily take another engine, as there are many better ones from a pure technical standpoint. Godot is also a community, and the engine is only growing so big because of it. People talk to each other, help each other if someone gets stuck on a problem, share resources and learning material and discuss engine development or game development in general. The moment this community takes irreparable damage, be it from overmoderation, bad management or something else, the game is over and the mission of the Godot Foundation failed.
P.S.: this whole messages comes from someone who worked for the past 12 months as Community Manager for an MMO, because game development was no fun anymore after Unity decided to scare away their whole core community with horrible management decisions