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The only supposedly trending posts twitter wanted to show me related to this bad news were all about bitcoin.
I'd never heard of GrapheneOS till 15 minutes ago. I couldn't understand why someone would randomly start swatting an OSS project maintainer.. googling around a bit lead me to this Louis Rossmann video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4To-F6W1NT0

Also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx7CZ-2Bajg

Yikes. Hope this Daniel guy can get some help and find some peace, poor dude seems incredibly unstable. :(

I'm not familiar with the project either but the videos you shared are from people right in the center of the drama it seems, so should be treated with a lot of scepticism.

Here's the opposite perspective by someone not themselves part of the drama:

https://youtu.be/G6Pj0Z2__SI

Suggesting that this person may indeed be socially insecure but also actually being actively targeted and physically at risk. So it may be the case you just shared two gaslighting videos.

I wouldn't be surprised if anybody who bothers to make a 20 minute video showing screenshots of conversations is mentally unhinged enough to call a swat team on other people.

So i wouldn't recommend interacting with this community at all.

The guy you posted to seems himself like he's certainly dramatic, just read one of this comments...

"Yeah, that move just seems like a dramatic line in a script. If you don't want to know what the personality is of a person, then don't interact with them. Is he going to shut down his computer shop because he doesn't like Tim Cook? Honestly, with kindness and respect, I think cause Louiss is on the spectrum he doesn't know how to interact with another autistic person with empathy."

This whole thing seems like a shit show, I've worked around open source for the better part of 15 years, this might be the most toxic thing I've seen yet. Seems good this Daniel Micay guy is stepping back from the project, I hope he can get some help and the project can flourish.

Yeah the guy i shared the video from is another person with a 20 minute video of screenshots, so he fits the exact same description.

My point was more that unless someone credible wants to spend days investigating we will never know the truth here, except for the obvious truth staring us in the face: stay away from _all_ _these_ _people.

Point well taken. I'm not an android user and as I said, not familiar with the project, but my, granted minimal, of reading about it leads me to believe it's a great project. Damn shame when projects devolve into this type of thing, fingers crossed they can recover! :)
> My point was more that unless someone credible wants to spend days investigating we will never know the truth here, except for the obvious truth staring us in the face: stay away from _all_ _these_ _people.

+1

It's difficult to even neutrally mention GrapheneOS / CalyxOS / DivestOS on reddit without getting an extremely angry response by one of the same 5-6 accounts who apparently spend all their time accusing each other of nebulous misdeeds. Ignoring them is by far the best response.

FWIW I was already a user of LineageOS and custom ROMs for years, and did move to GrapheneOS recently, but more for usability reasons than privacy/security ones. The WebUSB installer and OTA updates for Graphene are way more professional than downloading new releases off a guy on xda-developers and having to do a clean install (= wipe the phone) after major upgrades.

With that said, and with my tongue firmly in cheek, someone who thinks (rightly or wrongly) that the world is full of malicious people eager to mess with them might be exactly the psychological profile you want in the developer of a privacy-focused OS :)

That guy made a video about Techlore's video 8 months ago and didn't even watch the original video fully. I wouldn't trust his opinion.
wouldn't have expected a seasoned hn user to never have heard about grapheneos to be honest. i assume you have a smartphone ... have you never wondered about alternatives to stock android? i guess i can conclude that you use an iphone and never considered something else.
I'm sure there are many HN users who don't dabble in the android ecosystem, not enough hours in the day lol. I've been in the apple ecosystem after I left Symbian when the first iphone came out. Apple works well for me! Grapheneos looks great tho. :)
The 2nd video has a screenshot asking people to manufacture a consensus on HN regarding GrapheneOS, FWIW.
Wow. I didn't know us nerds are capable of this.
A good community-driven hardened Android distro needs someone with a strong personality. With strcat leaving I'm afraid that I can't trust GrapheneOS anymore and have to switch back to stock Android shipped by Google :(

Edit: To be clear, I don't fucking care about anything "privacy". I just want an exploit/forensics-hardened phone.

Finally.

Daniel created a great project, then did everything to make people not use it. Any criticism, harassment You don't believe his story with copperhead?, Harassment. And so on. You can already see his community fans with new accounts on HN saying that Louis conspired against Daniel, he didn't need to do anything , Daniel did this to himself.

For a background on this, have a look in louis's latest video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4To-F6W1NT0