I can explain why this is such a big deal to some people and why the Western FOSS community is full of drama (within the past few years). It's a long essay, but it takes a lot to understand why it got to this.

Originally the FOSS community (free and open source) wasn't too bad drama wise for multiple reasons. Everyone had a common enemy (Microsoft + proprietary software vendors), and nobody really had conflicting motivations. Everyone also seemed to be on a similar page regarding political views, with everyone seemingly sharing the same mix of left wing politics and libertarianism. Most notably political stuff at most would have been a website message or sending pity sob story emails to anyone doing an xscreensaver port to Windows, only to complain when someone sent him gay porn.

This came to a crashing halt for a few reasons. In the mid-2010s there was "Donglegate", in which some woman cried about a man making a dongle joke at a Python conference and got him fired, which backfired and got her fired too since this was the early 2010s and corporations wouldn't yet shield problem employees who were loyal to the cause. There was also Eich's ouster from Mozilla, and ESR made a famous post alleging that the "women in tech" crowd had come for Linus Torvalds, and said post would gain traction again when Linus made the infamous break post and said that he was using Coraline Ada's code of conduct.

Also in the mid 2010s, three things happened in America. The first is that gay marriage was legalized and the lobby turned towards transgender pet causes (solidified when Bruce Jenner came out as trans and the only mockery allowed was if you were shitting on him for not being left-wing, any "haha this Olympic medalist became a woman" jokes were banned). The second thing that happened is that the social media machine began to lose control of the narrative and topics for the first time, with one event known as "GamerGate" resulting in two divided sides online fighting. GamerGate was an event where some e-celebrity was caught having an affair with game journalists, and the media tried extremely hard to cover it up resulting in pushback. This scared the media and many in the tech industry to the core because everyone was supposed to "listen and believe". Yet had they just let it slide and ignored it, nobody would care about this years later. The actual events of this are nowhere near as important as the end result of this, which is that this entire thing split nerds into two camps: you were either for GamerGate (or right wing politics) and saw it as an attempt to reform a dying industry or you were against it and saw it as an attempt to harass women online.

The third thing that happened was that Donald Trump won the 2016 election, which wasn't supposed to happen, resulting in a repeat of GamerGate across American politics. If GamerGate was polarizing, Donald Trump winning activated a killswitch across tons and tons of nerds (and also celebrities, failed artists, and news people) at once. Suddenly, Donald Trump was literally Hitler 2 and was going to send all of the LGBT to the camps. Twitter and the media were flooded with nonstop lies and still are to this day about Trump, and they won't be happy until he is assassinated or in prison.

Also coincidentally, this is when the transgender craze began to spread like wildfire online but especially among two groups: easily influenced broken teens and nerds. This was fueled both by media coverage/promotion, offering an identity for those who lacked one, and the fact you can easily obtain HRT illegally without a prescription by ordering it online discreetly. This community became notorious for both telling everyone they meet that they're really a man who wants you to play along with his delusions of being a woman, wanting to be the most oppressed minority, treating the transgender flag as a fashion symbol or streetwear brand, and making sure to derail every conversation to only talk about transgender issues if the topic comes up. It also became a red flag if any user were to have 🏳️‍⚧️ in their bio or username as any user with such would be prone to irrational behavior, I mean that community does nickname their drug binges a "second puberty" after all. While many talk about trannies entering the community from outside, in reality many had a big online footprint within the tech community under a male name.

So what does any of this have to do with free and open source software, and the Alex drama? Simple. As a result of Trump and whatever the latest thing the media is talking about (be it the war in Ukraine, trans rights, some terrorist attack/shooting, some illegal protest being framed as a terrorist attack, some high profile fake suicide, and more) anything and everything has to be a political soapbox for left wing politics. In the software community, it has become extremely common to use software as a soapbox for issues as well. Some no-name developers would re-license their software under restrictive licenses that had clauses saying that you couldn't use this if you worked for someone he/she hated. There were a few NPM developers sabotaging their code to protest being broke and whatnot. More developers than I can count also sabotaged products if you had a Russian IP with one trying to nuke hard disks and others just halting updates.

The other thing is that thanks to how political the FOSS community is, you also have to be up to date with whatever the current trends are. Bitcoin was the coolest thing in that community 10 years ago, but because some media website said that it was killing the planet and political dissidents use it, you must not use it. Don't get me started on how every single one of them wants to bury their views on lolicon from 10 years ago, or how free speech was their thing.

Then there's how the LGBT community treats others online. Put it this way: that community doesn't just have thin skin if you accidentally use the wrong pronouns, it is now considered a hate crime in many western countries to do this deliberately. Unfortunately dictating what people can say about you goes against free speech, so their free speech activism had to go too. The thing is, they want free speech for themselves.

Which is what happened to Alex. Alex was allowed to get harassed by the other Pleroma developers, but he was not allowed to call them out for it. Alex was ruining Pleroma for Soapbox-FE according to them, but as he pointed out Pleroma had modifications to interoperate with Misskey, a software with less users than Soapbox. Why did it have those? Because according to Alex, the top instances that run Soapbox and Alex have political views and in many cases aesthetics that aren't trendy with the Pleroma developers, but the instances running Misskey had aesthetics and political views that were. Developers were running smear pieces on Alex on their website, but how dare you call them out for doing the same thing.

All of this was because he was against a pet cause that somehow has become the biggest cultural issue of the last decade over here to the point many people are against it but won't say it in fear of losing their jobs.