@GrapheneOS @elly so it was posted on KF, but a million people watched it? i don’t think KF has this many users, and it would surely get taken down everywhere else. where did you get that million from?

@domi @elly No, it was posted on YouTube by a well known content creator who uses Kiwi Farms and involved them. He made the content in their style with similar tactics, although toned down for broader appeal. He actively uses and posts on the site.

@domi @GrapheneOS Internet drama, serious business

From that description I assume they meant an old video Louis Rossmann made after he had a personal spat with one of GrapheneOS’s developers (he’s a douchebag that’s been exposed as a kiwifarmer, so that would check out). I never watched that video because I had better things to do than seeing someone’s personal drama dragged into a public space.

Anyway, I would like to propose to end the discussion here. It’s not going to be productive or pleasant for anyone involved. Some people call it “agree to disagree”, or something along those lines. I certainly won’t indulge in further discussion myself, count me out.

@GrapheneOS @elly okay. did brodie robertson make a video on you and a bunch of people from the projects you mention boosted it on fedi?

istg if that’s it then you need to touch grass

@elly @domi Rossmann spend half a year privately and publicly supporting ongoing bullying and harassment. That bullying and harassment culminated in severe swatting attacks aimed at killing the founder of GrapheneOS via law enforcement. That's no exaggeration and there were 20 police officers with handguns/rifles pointing guns at them screwing conflicting orders as they exited their house around 1am. That's an actual dangerous situation and is genuinely attempted murder, not some kind of prank.

@domi @elly No, absolutely not at all.

@elly @domi Rossmann continued engaging in the bullying afterwards, regularly making public jabs in his live streams and videos along with continuing to support the main person who actively orchestrated the harassment. Rossmann had been an active Kiwi Farms user for most of the time he was doing this and was well acquainted with them and their tactics by this point. Rossmann's politics heavily changed throughout that year and onwards. He made multiple videos referencing KF prior to this.

@GrapheneOS @elly hey, it’s okay. chill. we all agree that rossmann is a dipshit, for this reason and many others.

@elly @domi Casey Connoly made a thread on X linking to Rossmann's content and endorsing it as true despite it very obviously being filled with fabrications and bullying aimed at targeting someone with harassment. They contributed directly to pushing false narratives aimed at portraying the target as insane, delusional, etc. and the same false narrative from Henry Fisher and Rossmann that because we're repeatedly attacked and debunk it, we're somehow the aggressors in that situation.

@elly @domi People repeatedly make threads where they call the founder of GrapheneOS insane, schizophrenic, etc. with no basis and push fabricated stories about him while simultaneously baselessly claiming that our community and project which do not target people that way or engage in anything similar are somehow the toxic ones. It's not our community raiding rooms, swatting people and pushing endless lies about them trying to portray them as crazy and eventually getting Kiwi Farms involved.

@GrapheneOS @elly

we’re repeatedly attacked and debunk it, we’re somehow the aggressors in that situation.

this may sound like i’m a dick, but please hear me through - have you thought about talking to a therapist about this? I’ve struggled with something similar due to attacks online, and it took me a long time to come up with a way to efficiently deescalate drama.

sometimes it’s best to stay quiet when there are bullies outside, eh?

@GrapheneOS @elly

People repeatedly make threads where they call the founder of GrapheneOS insane, schizophrenic, etc. with no basis

I write this with no hate, but - please look at this thread. If you take any of your posts out of context and show it to someone who uses the word “schizophrenic” as an insult, do you think they wouldn’t use it?

This also is something where I’d suggest you talk to a therapist about it. Genuinely

@domi @elly The people engaging in this libel and harassment are the ones who need therapy. It's not simply online harassment but also real world harassment including violence not limited to ongoing swatting attacks. It includes threats of a dog being poisoned and a lot more, many threatening things being mailed, etc. How is therapy going to change that every day our rooms are raided by people engaging in harassment and much more? It's an ongoing disruption and drain of our resources.

@GrapheneOS @elly I’m not using therapy as a negative thing / an insult. I’ve suggested it purely because I’m seeing you struggle (here, and in many other interactions), and I’m worried for a fellow human.

Accepting this is a first step towards recovery

@domi @elly A bunch of the people who are doing that are open source developers involved in prominent projects. These are not simply some anonymous people on the internet. A bunch of open source developers who make software many people use are part of this and have used the word schizophrenic that way. That includes but isn't limited to the 2 projects mentioned in this thread, which are in fact not anywhere close to the main ones engaging in it but that doesn't change they have done so.

@GrapheneOS @elly I’m sorry that they insulted you in this way. i fucking hate ad hominem.

that being said: from my perspective, some of my friends are being attacked for stuff you cannot even link me to. you proceed to spread negative rep about them despite not having receipts. i don’t like that :(

@domi @elly If it was meant in good faith, why is it a public post instead of a private one? Making public posts that way comes across as directly supporting the false narratives attacking our founder and other team members even if that wasn't the intent. It doesn't only come across that way to us but also enables the people targeting us. It's very likely one of the people involved here who actively uses Kiwi Farms will post archives/screenshots of this thread there so bear that in mind.

@GrapheneOS @elly it wasn’t a private post because i thought we were talking in public…

also please find one post where I actually despise and hate something, that’s not meant as a joke. i don’t really make those, as a rule

@domi @GrapheneOS yup, i think that is the core of the issue. you're eager to defend yourself, but often this comes with making accusations towards others. if you keep doing that again and again without backing up your claims with anything, it'll be difficult for people to see this in a good light

[untagging elly as she seems to have asked for that at some point?]

@mei @domi We've backed up what we said many times including making a thread responding to Casey's libel/bullying/harassment in direct support of Kiwi Farms and pushing the exact same false narratives they target many open source developers with on their site. This is something they did and never removed or retracted,. Multiple people supporting people who engaged in this harassment are posting here so we're responding rather than finding their X account or an archive of it if they deleted it.

@domi @GrapheneOS *sigh* I have to agree. Best thing you can do in front of "bullies" is to ignore them. Same thing goes for dealing with abusers - "best revenge is a life well lived".

I have first-hand experience with both. Therapy doesn't mean an insult, nobody (at least in this thread) wants to hurt you. It took me years to accept I needed help myself, so I *think* I know how you feel.
From my perspective at least, you've showed up and replied to my comment feeling hurt by purely my own experience/opinion.

Since @domi chose kindness, hear me out: You've clearly been hurt and never processed the trauma you've experienced. Because of that every single bit of criticism feels like an attack to you.
You can't control how people feel, but you can influence the image they have of you (and right now, you're influencing it negatively).

When all is said and done - sure, GrapheneOS is an Android distribution. However, it has a lot of genuinely cool features and good engineering put into it. Hell, I'm still interested in hardware you're working on!

To put words where my mouth is - I also blew up on multiple occasions when project I was maintaining got overwhelming and people demanded more and more for free. This was especially challenging for me, because I sometimes still have issues dealing with my emotions or navigating social constructs (aka my neurodivergent ass wasn't trained for this), plus social anxiety (which did get a lot better thanks to events like FOSDEM or C3) and no self-confidence to speak of.
Thankfully I had a good friend who (figuratively) slapped me and gave me an ultimatum: You either seek therapy, or our friendship is done. I chose the former (and while it's still not perfect, I'm working on it as mentioned previously).

Seems like you could use such a friend yourself, I can only hope this random comment from a random nerd in Europe will encourage you to at least try therapy. There's no stigma or shame. Everybody deserves happiness, including you.

@domi @elly It doesn't come across that way. especially when you're saying you're friends with someone who engaged in harassment and libel towards us which had very tangible consequences through them involving more people and projects in it which led to us feeling increasingly unwelcome in large parts of the open source community. People involved in this harassment have caused immense disruption and issues for us. People who want to harm us hops onto that bandwagon of person attacks/harassment.

@elly @domi None of that comes across as genuine from someone who has repeatedly made inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS and is friends with multiple people involved in actual bullying and harassment towards us regardless of how you might try to dismiss or downplay it. What Casey did was not minor and it had a very tangible impact on us. It caused numerous people to join the harassment and attacks on our project. It snowballed into massive disruption. It's a small fraction of it but not small.

@elly @domi We're not perceiving it to be an attack on us and it's not one person who feels attacked. It's our overall team who are being attacked and targeted. You understand we have a team of full time developers, right? We're receiving an additional large amount of funding this year to expand that further. It's one person who is the focus of the harassment but numerous of our team members both paid and volunteers have been attacked and multiple people have had to become inactive due to it.

@GrapheneOS @elly I don’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry that you feel this way, I hope we can find some common ground.

I don’t support boosting harassment, or spreading FUD. But I don’t think that a project contributor boosting a post from their private account (not a project account) should be used as a weapon against the project. Nor against the person. Boosting a post is one of the littlest contributions one can do to anything.

bro is the therapist

@elly @domi You can make whatever attacks you want on GrapheneOS. postmarketOS team members have contributed to making life miserable for two dozen people working on GrapheneOS. They haven't simply contributed to that in a small way but rather a large one by onboarding more people onto it and then never doing anything to walk it back or contain it. postmarketOS has a community that's highly hostile towards us and attacking us on numerous platforms. If it grows, so do the attacks on our project.

@GrapheneOS @domi can i have a link to something concrete, about the whole thing pmOS & GNOME developers participating in harassment?

@domi @elly They did not boost a post. They made a whole thread about it directly promoting harassment content, making highly dishonest claims to portray someone as delusional and contributing their own DARVO narrative trying to portray us as somehow doing what they are with no basis for it. You keep misinterpreting our posts and it doesn't come across as someone engaging in good faith but rather someone repeatedly misrepresenting our statements to support their friend who did vile things to us.

@GrapheneOS @elly sorry - i’ve only now found one of the threads, and you didn’t explain it very clearly before.

to be fair I don’t see a DARVO narrative in their actions. they’re voicing a dislike and quoting a rossmann video for it. I find that despicable in 2026, but in 2023 it wasn’t as widely known that rossmann is a dipshit.

and, again - sorry that this caused disruptions for you, and my condolences for the harassment.

@mei @domi We have to start by explaining the overall situation to you and the hostility towards us discourages us from linking to harassment content or especially people you support / are friends with making dishonest claims about us. We could simply link you to that and then out of confirmation bias you may start supporting it and spreading the videos and Kiwi Farms thread yourself. We don't know you but we do know what the people you're supporting have done and continue doing.

@mei @domi We can start doing that but right now we're replying to a steady stream of posts making accusations about us from people who are openly saying they support / are friends with someone who has quite blatantly bullied and harassed our founder with libelous claims which were never retracted. You're quite clearly going to approach it with a heavy bias against us and giving you a list of links to harassment content including people you support doing it isn't very appealing right now.

@GrapheneOS @mei most of those posts are just me, your replies tab is public :)

i’m not accusing you of anything, i’m just voicing my opinion (very politely).

i don’t know why you’re already assuming biases. i think that we’re still trying to be as nice as possible here…

I’m not in support of either side spreading public libel about the other. and this thread does classify as you doing that :(

@GrapheneOS @mei @domi Saying "trust me bro" isn't exactly proving your point.

@tragivictoria @mei @domi We linked them to the main content in a DM and are happy to link the thread from Casey to them there too once we've had an opportunity to talk about the video and go through many of the blatant fabrications and misrepresentations in it. We're willing to provide the evidence and talk about it but we're starting with what was linked to repeatedly before getting to what was said on a dozen occasions. Going out of the way to spread that video was already harassment.

why do people genuinely think “ignore the bullies” is the magical solution to everything like i really wanna know what makes you think it actually works

either ur so privileged as hell and never faced actual bullying and threats to your life and even attempts on your life

or the most bullying you’ve experienced is someone saying “you look stupid”

@GrapheneOS @domi i am familiar with Rossmann's video. I watched it while I was a GrapheneOS user and didn't find it damning enough to take any particular action. I've since forgotten what it was about apart from the fact that some kind of DM screenshots were involved.

I've since become aware of Rossmann's activity on KiwiFarms. this is enough for me to definitively discount that video's claims.

have the pmOS developers actively participated in the campaign, or did they just, like, acknowledge the video's existence?

@mei @domi Casey repeatedly linked to Rossmann's video, which is blatant harassment content bullying our founder and pushing fabrications about him to direct more harassment towards him. Rossmann posted it after swatting attacks because they had a fight in a DM about Rossmann's support for the main person doing it and regular jabs in his live streams / videos / chat rooms towards our founder. Our founder was upset after being swatted and harassed, and Rossmann live streamed the chat + trolled.

@mei @domi On Twitter, Casey made a thread about it attacking him personally. Casey heavily supported the narrative of him being insane and delusional along with engaging in the same DARVO tactics used by Kiwi Farms and Rossmann to portray us banning people engaging in harassment and responding to / debunking it as somehow being harassment itself which doesn't make any sense. It involves portraying posts like this one as somehow being harassment, despite it being the truth about what happened.

@mei @domi Multiple other postmarketOS developers have regularly posted that video and engaged in attacking our founder by calling him insane and delusional. It's not a one time thing and as far as we can tell is a still ongoing thing. There was no removal/retraction of Casey's thread that we're aware of and it was spread throughout the open source community which got more people on board with the attacks.

@mei @domi
Rossmann isn't simply a Kiwi Farms forum user, he tries to use them as his personal army while pretending he's just there because he doesn't want to be targeted. He regularly rants on their forum and names organizations/people. He has made content about Kiwi Farms and people they target. He knows what they do. He clearly made his video to appeal to that kind of crowd and them specifically. He leaked personal info and leaked emails with him where Kiwi Farms was discussed.

@mei @domi When Cloudflare was hosting Kiwi Farms, were very vocal about it and it put us heavily on their radar. We were trying to help people we know who were targeted by them. At the time, we weren't being targeted to the extent we are now and Kiwi Farms wasn't involved. Our significant advocacy about Cloudflare and others hosting them while excusing that as 'free speech' (amplifying people engaging in harassment is not part of supporting free speech) led to them wanting to target us more.

This could be a post on your forum, or just screenshot(s) or like single link to something that gives you a bit of credibility. You don't need to whistleblow Snowden-style and drop 100 google doc pages of proof, I just want to see at least a piece of that what has been promised n-th times across various social media posts.

@GrapheneOS @mei @domi

@pj @domi @mei We already started sharing the links with them and haven't received a confirmation that they looked at the initial stuff we showed them already so we can move on to finding the thread from Casey and numerous other examples to share those.

@mei @domi We want the harassment to stop. We don't want an admission of fault or an apology. We want the people who helped promote Rossmann's content and contributed their own attacks to do the opposite. They're in a position of influence over their community which is regularly engaging in attacks on us. Instead we see a steady stream of false claims about the GrapheneOS project, libel on our founder and inaccurate attacks on our community/team from postmarketOS and their supporters.

@GrapheneOS @domi But... I don't want to attack you (personally) or the project. I have no reason for it.

I bought a Pixel 6 back in 2022 *specifically* because of your project, stopped using it not because of something *you* did, but because I simply don't want Google's Services Frameworks on my phone at all (hence why notifications and other features weren't working). It would be exactly the same on LineageOS or other AOSP builds, it's entirely Google's fault (and my stubbornness).
Phone was also too bulky/heavy for me, it was genuinely hard to use because of my condition and caused wrist pain among other issues. If hardware you're working on would be much smaller/lighter, have a mSD and headphone jack then I would gladly buy it.

Once again, I'm somewhat adjacent to pmOS community but I genuinely never seen anyone badmouthing the project. The only thing I keep hearing at various events (in different communities) is "stay away from GrapheneOS's toxic community" (disclaimer: never been to your chats, so I won't comment whether that's true or not).

I genuinely think it's a "spiral of hatred" where X time ago someone messed up an interaction, things got sour, and over time it spiraled out of control. Then the whole Rossmann thing happened, you didn't know how to deal with it so you started being more and more defensive (especially after trauma you've experienced) and whenever people said anything remotely negative about the project, it felt like an attack to you.
I hope you realize that the sentence you wrote:

> Every time you make inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS, you get closer to us beginning a massive response including organizing our community against the project as has been done by the postmarketOS community towards GrapheneOS with endless attacks on our team.

Perfectly describes what I just said. Someone threw a rock at us, we threw a rock back. Except that rock hit the wrong person, so now we have two people throwing rocks at us. Rinse and repeat, I hope you will see what I see.

@pj @domi @mei We already started sharing the links with them and haven't received a confirmation that they looked at the initial stuff we showed them already so we can move on to finding the thread from Casey and numerous other examples to share those.

We also already do have threads directly responding to the attacks in question on our social media accounts. At the point we made our Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, they're mostly on those platforms too in addition to X since we post on each.

@GrapheneOS @mei the last “harassment” from the side of Casey i could find was that thread you mentioned. it’s from 2023, like the rossmann video. I don’t think there’s any active hate from pmOS’ side to you :/

as for attacks in general - they’re not gonna stop. You’re on the public internet, you either adapt or perish. I know from all the fuckwards that attack(ed) me for some BS..

could we strike a deal - you don’t publicly attack pmOS members, and they won’t “harass” you anymore?

@elly @domi Multiple postmarketOS developers have engaged in blatant bullying and harassment towards our team. As long as they're still involved with postmarketOS and have not acknowledged that they were spreading harassment content and posting their own then that's not settled and is an active topic. There have also been recent personal attacks by several postmarketOS developers/contributors including craftyguy. This does not date back to 2023 and is not minor. We plan to make a post about it.

@elly @domi We've posted accurate information about postmarketOS and also accurate information about what people there have done towards us. We haven't engaged in any bullying or harassment. Our community is not harassing people or raiding rooms. We're not posting videos with character assassination based around false claims. The attacks are very one sided. You somehow consider us posting our take on postmarketOS and the claims you make about GrapheneOS to be on the same level as harassment.

@GrapheneOS @domi Well then, take you time and collect your thoughts. I like both projects and if "mutual slap in the face" is needed to end this spiral of "they said", "they did" then I would like so see it happen. Please also consider what @domi and I discussed in other comments, we genuinely have no ulterior motives (be the change you want to see in the world or something something).

@elly @domi

> why notifications and other features weren't working

Notifications work fine without sandboxed Google Play in many apps supporting using their own push or UnifiedPush including multiple email apps, messaging apps (Signal/Molly, Element / Element X for Matrix, WhatsApp, Conversations for XMPP and others) and many others.

Tap-to-pay also does work fine on GrapheneOS even though Google Pay bans it. There are other implementations including ones working without Google Play.

@elly @domi Users in the US don't have a tap-to-pay option on GrapheneOS itself. Users in the UK and EU have multiple options available for it including at least in the EU multiple which work without Google Play.

There's a large open source app ecosystem which works without Google Play and many mainstream apps too. It's still a large app ecosystem.

There's hardware-based virtualization now for non-native apps now which is their focus for it while our focus will be using it for native apps too.

@elly @domi

> stay away from GrapheneOS's toxic community

> never been to your chats, so I won't comment whether that's true or not

It's the postmarketOS community and many other parts of the open source community which are toxic. It's their project members and community members heavily participating in bullying and harassment not only towards our founder and team but also our community. Our community chat rooms are heavily targeted with endless raids including from YOUR toxic community.

@GrapheneOS @domi You're right, except different banking apps across the world do different (cursed) "security measures".
For example here in Poland:
a) ING Bank: Checks installation source, bootloader lock, root. If application wasn't installed by Play Store, application will refuse to let you login.
b) PKO: Oh, you enabled "Developer Options"? No banking for you!
c) mBank: You have root and unlocked bootloader? Whatever, we don't care but will show you a pop-up just so you won't sue us if you lose money because of malware

@elly @domi Claiming our team and community are toxic is DARVO attacks. Your community is raiding our rooms, engaging in endless personal attacks and libelous fabricated stories but somehow it's our community not doing those things towards you folks which is the toxic one. How is that meant to work? These false claims go right along with the claims that our founder is insane, delusional, etc. and are pervasive in the postmarketOS community and elsewhere. Our community isn't doing that, yours is.

@elly @domi postmarketOS team and community make endless inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS and our team. The bullying and harassment is part of that. It's very one sided.

We're not making inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS and our substantial community doesn't either. Our Discord server alone has 23202 members and was created November 2023 as an alternative to Matrix. Telegram has 13124. Matrix has a lot too. There's also a SimpleX room, our forum, etc. and many people on these platforms.

@elly @domi Our community is not a small group of people. They're not going around bullying/harrassing people or spreading misinformation about other projects. We quickly shut it down in our rooms and have made certain discussions such as desktop OS discussion mostly off limits because we don't want to have to deal with avoiding people making inaccurate attacks on Linux distributions, macOS and Windows as part of people's desire for endless fights about it.

@GrapheneOS @domi Again, this isn't an opinion of pmOS community (nor mine). I've heard this from multiple unrelated people I've met for the first time at FOSDEM, GPN, C3 or XDC.

Pretty much whenever I pulled out my phone and someone asked which OS I was running their response was either "oh cool, I'm also running GrapheneOS" or "project seems cool, but community uuuh, y'know".

I'm simply telling you how people in real world perceive your project, since it's likely that nobody offered you an unbiased opinion/report before.

@elly @domi The toxicity in our chat rooms are the people raiding the rooms. They endlessly create one account after another on Matrix. On Discord, they're literally buying accounts to use in many cases and are getting phone numbers to use for creating them since IPs with bad reputation have that checked. Some of those people come from the desktop Linux and postmarketOS community. They come to our rooms harassing our team and community relentlessly because they're angry GrapheneOS exists.

@GrapheneOS @domi Oh, but that's just... a par for the course for Matrix/Discord. Same thing was happening to us, it's precisely why we stopped using those platforms. They're unmoderable (especially if you allow matrix.org accounts), they waste your time and ruin your mental health.

@elly @domi Linux desktop and postmarketOS communities are widely perceived as toxic outside of them. They're certainly perceived as extraordinarily toxic by our community. If you actually join our rooms to lurk then you'll see the actual toxicity is coming from other communities raiding our rooms rather than ours. Those communities raiding our rooms including people who like the person who posted this thread and yourself have an axe to grind with AOSP and anything based on it.

@GrapheneOS @elly @domi looks like pmOS has a code of conduct team. if you've reported the raids and the community members behind the raids haven't received any repercussions, I would definitely start mentally putting pmOS in the "best stay away" category

@elly @domi There's nothing unbiased about your takes on any of this. You're strongly opposed to us even if you claim otherwise and are making many inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS. You're part of an actually toxic community and project with people who engage in actual bullying and harassment towards our team. The way you're downplaying it, covering it up and trying to both sides it makes you directly complicit in it. You are not neutral, and you are not supportive of our project.

@elly @domi We added to Discord because Matrix heavily enabled people to raid our rooms and harass us along with having an extraordinarily toxic community on it as a whole due to heavy usage by neo-nazis, Kiwi Farms, people who collect CSAM and spam it in our rooms, etc. Matrix is a hotbed for all of that. Discord isn't especially since nearly all the people who join are creating a Discord account for the first time. It has fantastic anti-abuse / mod tools because of how gaming communities are.

@elly @domi We reluctantly use Discord as the primary chat platform now because it's so good at anti-abuse and moderation. It has a proper set of rooms managed together with server-side moderation we can heavily configure with word matches, regex, mention spam detection, etc. It has, server-side auto-detection of pornography/gore. It has roles for granting privileges so we can avoid people being able to post inline media for 2 days if we want, etc. It has a LOT of other anti-abuse tools too.

@elly @domi There's nothing unbiased about your takes on any of this. You're strongly opposed to us even if you claim otherwise and are making many inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS. You're part of an actually toxic community and project with people who engage in actual bullying and harassment towards our team. The way you're downplaying it, covering it up and trying to both sides it makes you directly complicit in it. You are not neutral, and you are not supportive of our project.

@mei @domi @elly @GrapheneOS As far as I know we have not received anything like that so far.
I am also not aware of any team member actively raiding GrapheneOS chats. If you have proof it would be nice to link to them because so far it's mostly been "trust me bro" (no offense intended).

Take care

@mei @GrapheneOS @domi @elly note that I have PMs disabled on fediverse, if you want to share these in PM please do so to "f_" on irc.oftc.net or @funderscore:postmarketos.org

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei (I am *not* part of the CoC team, but I can reach out to them as needed)

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei you can also email coc@postmarketos.org by the way, that'd be the preferred option.

@fun @domi @elly @mei

> I am also not aware of any team member actively raiding GrapheneOS chats.

We said the pmOS community did that not the postmarketOS team.

> If you have proof it would be nice to link to them

We do have it.

> so far it's mostly been "trust me bro"

Multiple people on the postmarketOS team have seen what one of them posted on Twitter along with many others. There's no point claiming that it never happened.

We're talking to @ariadne about it now rather than here.

@fun @domi @elly @mei @ariadne We removed some of our posts here to talk about it privately instead which we are doing and if you stop making accusations towards us then we'll stop posting about it here. We're entirely capable of finding and posting an archive of the deleted posts on Twitter if people are denying it happened, but as far as we know the person who did it is not denying that it happened. As a general rule we're not going to report a project itself due to bad experiences with it.

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei @ariadne

I'm glad you're talking to @ariadne about this. She's nice.

I hope both projects can collaborate on things one day, I think that would be very beneficial tech-wise, as you (GrapheneOS team) have a lot of insights on security and such for example, so we can share notes etc... :)

Take care of yourself!

@fun @domi @elly @mei @ariadne Fedora addressed bullying/libel we reported by having 2 people remove posts. GNOME simply ignored our reports.

Here's Mozilla:

> The actions that are alleged to have violated the CPG are:
>
> Disruptive behaviour: calling that people “allow nazis to contribute to your project”
>
> Personal attacks: accusing other people of swatting you and other engineers.

Those "other people" weren't their project members, just to clarify.

> should be addressed to the police

@GrapheneOS @ariadne @domi @elly @mei I hate drama and I'm sure you hate it too so if this can be solved well I'm all for it :)

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei That's nice of you ^^

Yeah perhaps avoid fingerpointing in Twitter at this point in time, I want this solved peacefully and I'm sure you want this too. Fingerpointing may just make things worse.

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei @ariadne If there's anything else you need from me, I accept PMs from irc/matrix (irc preferred but matrix also works), so you know where to find me

@fun @domi @elly @mei We replied to this thread because the original post made inaccurate claims about AOSP and projects based on it including GrapheneOS. We then saw many more attacks on GrapheneOS claiming it's non-viable, a dead end, not doing any valuable work, etc. so we replied to a few of those. Since people felt like attacking our team to promote another project, we brought up an unresolved situation which is not just about several threads on Twitter in 2023 but more recent things too.

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei It seems my message did not go through (technical difficulties heh)

I personally don't think your project is a dead end or not doing any valuable work, quite the opposite actually! I do work on postmarketOS because I'm sick and tired of the whole Android ecosystem but I'm glad projects like GrapheneOS still exist to this day. I know of a few people that use it and are overall happy with it. Personally I don't use it because it doesn't support my current phone and I don't really want to fund Google very much, but it's great that it remains an available option that is still actively maintained (which is sadly not the case for many other Android distros that died off circa 2018...)

@fun @domi @elly @mei It ended up here and opening it on this end caused a full screen error message from the client side part of Mastodon:

https://berkeley.edu.pl/notice/B29MlpoSL4In1bdCq0

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei heh, isn't that wonderful :P

@fun @domi @elly @mei We're partnered with a major Android OEM and they're actively working on supporting GrapheneOS for devices in 2027 by meeting all of our update and security requirements. They weren't able to do it for the upcoming devices because Qualcomm didn't get hardware memory tagging working properly on every variant of their latest SoC generation that's in the process of launching. The upper level cache had to be changed to support MTE and they didn't do it for each SoC variant yet.

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei That's awesome to hear!

@fun @domi @elly @mei Fairphone 5 doesn't have the updates and hardware-based security features we require so we can't use it. They use the end-of-life Linux 5.4 kernel branch and weren't providing LTS updates prior to end of life. It's missing a hardware memory tagging, pointer authentication and branch target identification at the CPU level and a bunch of other things. It has no secure element. The updates for firmware/drivers are problematic too, not just the Linux kernel branch they use.

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei I'm well aware of the EOL 5.4 kernel issue, that's why I'm all for using mainline (maybe with patches to harden security).

Anyway, if said OEM produces phones with the major benefits of my FP5 (good repairability and perhaps good mainline support) I can consider it as my next phone ^^

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei I do know I got LTS updates on mine though, but I don't run the stock OS (wiped it as soon as I got it to install LineageOS instead, yes, I know, not all that great but gets the job done for now)

@fun @domi @elly @mei The issue is that Linux 5.4 is end-of-life since December 3rd:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1049060/

Fairphone 4 (the previous device) and Pixel 6 both launched in October 2021, the Fairphone 4 with the 4.19 LTS branch and Pixel 6 with 5.10. Pixel 6 and 7 later moved from 5.10 to 6.1 while the Pixel 8 moved from 5.15 to 6.1. They'll likely move to 6.6 soon. Android usually uses 1 LTS branch ahead for microdroid and other virtual machines which is moving from 6.6 to 6.12 right now.

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei yep! I'm aware of that, actually used that as an argument in some discussion over on IRC ;)

@fun @domi @elly @mei For the devices we're working on with our OEM partner, we plan to move to new LTS branches similar to Pixels but perhaps faster than they do.

Android officially supports 6.12 for devices launched with or upgraded to Android 16 but Pixels are cautious due to how many regressions there are in new kernel versions. Pixel 10 launched at the end of 2025 using 6.6 and that indicates they're going to move older devices to 6.6 soon. It's essentially mandatory to move yearly now.

@fun @domi @elly @mei Greg KH is the main one maintaining the kernel.org LTS branches and also the Android GKI LTS branches based on those which have additional backported features and the driver ABI stability approach we don't think makes much sense. Pixels use the same latest kernel source tree to build the drivers and update them together anyway. They split it with ABI stability so vendors can update kernel image / base modules separately but no OEM is actually doing that as far as we know.

@GrapheneOS @domi @elly @mei I think trying to mainline things as much as possible could greatly help you in this, then you have only few patches to carry downstream and rebasing becomes easier

@fun @domi @elly @mei Greg KH works for Google and the LTS kernels are clearly heavily based around Google's needs. You may have seen their lifetime was temporarily extended to 6 years, which coincided with the launch of the Pixel 6 with 5 years of support. However, Pixels began moving to new LTS kernel branches in practice and Google wants other Android OEMs to do that so they stopped supporting 6 years of updates and it was reduced back down to 2 which really implies updating it every year.

@fun @domi @elly @mei 6+ months for a kernel branch to be considered stable enough, then using it for a year and then moving to the next branch. Pixels are currently in the process of moving to that approach and we need our OEM partner to be able to help us do the same thing even if Qualcomm isn't officially supporting it yet. It's possible Qualcomm will support it though because it's unclear how long term support is supposed to work without kernel.org branches when it was delegated there.

@fun @domi @elly @mei Android doesn't require any changes to the Linux kernel since multiple years ago. However, there are out-of-tree drivers used for a lot of hardware in practice which need to be ported to new kernel versions. Android has GKI branches providing a bunch of changes to make a stable ABI for drivers within the LTS branch which is a huge maintenance burden they're taking on for dealing with the LTS revision updates. We don't think it makes much sense but we're not maintaining it.

@fun @domi @elly @mei GKI with support for ABI stability was done alongside the move to 6 years of LTS support upstream. Since they started moving to new LTS branches on production devices and dropped the kernel.org LTS support back down to 2 years from 6, it makes far less sense to put so much effort into trying to make it easier for OEMs to update the kernel at the expense of doing a bunch of extra work that's quite ugly. Not really clear why they are bothering as OEMs didn't really use it.

@fun @domi @elly @mei We could switch to the regular LTS kernels if we wanted but we'd need to backport the many improvements Android has added to the GKI branches since we wouldn't want to lose backported fixes, performance improvements and security features which aren't in the upstream LTS. Android's GKI branch has a wider scope of backports. GKI LTS is maintained by Greg KH and merged back and forth with the GKI branch, which is what we use for GrapheneOS to keep up with LTS releases.

@fun @domi @elly @mei We don't want the GKI ABI stability stuff and consider it quite problematic. We do want most of their additional backports though. We don't want to reintroduce bugs, worse performance, worse battery life and lose security features from losing their backports. It's a painful thing to deal with since the upstream LTS scope is so small. All of this including the upstream LTS branches is quite half-baked. It's largely just Greg KH doing it and many fixes aren't backported.

@fun @domi @elly @mei If fixes are marked for inclusion in stable, applying them is attempted. If it doesn't apply cleanly and it's not easy to fix then they're skipped and someone has to take notice and decide to help deal with it for it to get backported. There isn't some significant team working on those kernel.org LTS branches but rather it's Greg KH doing it and Google supporting it. Enterprise LTS distributions don't help with it. Canonical makes their own. It's not very collaborative.

@fun @domi @elly @mei We aren't very interested in making upstream Linux kernel contributions anymore due to how much pushback there has been to implementing better security protections and using Rust for drivers. It adds a massive amount of time investment to deal with them which could go to doing far more hardening work instead. It's trivial to port things to new versions compared to the difficulty of upstreaming it. Drivers are easier to upstream but it wouldn't actually help us much.

@fun @domi @elly @mei A driver being upstream just means it gets tree wide changes made to it to keep it building and maybe working. It doesn't mean ti's actually tested on the hardware. It also doesn't mean anything is tested with KASan / HWKASan / MTE. We need to fix a steady stream of memory corruption bugs downstream for MTE including from LTS revisions.

We had a lot of trouble trying to upstream minor hardening changes so upstreaming our planned major overhauls doesn't seem realistic.

@fun @domi @elly @mei Our effort to try to upstream changes heavily stalled our kernel hardening work and demotivated us from doing it. It's why there isn't far more than it is and it's why the linux-hardened project became inactive and is no longer actively developed beyond a minor set of changes, configuration default changes and backports maintained by an Arch Linux developer as a fork of what we used to publish. It doesn't use most of the hardening we do in the form others use it.