Jonas Chevalier: one other aspect that I believe is important if we want de-escalation to be an integral part of the community culture, is that people truly realize that everybody they talk to has their own complex life and background and experiences, experiences that may be difficult to convey to someone else but are no less true because of that.

this kind of ties into "assume good faith", but I think it's something that needs to be highlighted explicitly, because many people (in general, not specific to NixOS) have a tendency of treating other people in chatrooms almost like faceless bots, someone whose entire personality and life consists only of that which they can observe externally, and those external behaviours are viewed only in the context of their own personal experiences.

and that leads to de-escalation failures in many cases; ranging from assumptions of "they hold bigoted views so they must be intentionally malicious" to "they say their life is so much harder but I think they're just seeking attention" to, in the worse cases, "you're just mentally ill". all because people are not really willing or prepared to consider that someone may legitimately arrive at a different conclusion than them just because they are experiencing the world from a different perspective