Don’t be nice

Nuxt lead Daniel Roe argues that open source leaders must choose being good over being nice by explicitly rejecting intolerance — kicking Nazis from Discord, naming DHH’s racism, and urging sponsors to withdraw — because neutrality in the face of hate normalizes it.

Key Points

• Daniel Roe, lead of the Nuxt framework, argues that ‘nice’ (from Latin nescius, ‘unaware’) often means suppressing one’s values to accommodate others — but when people oppose shared human values like inclusion, equality, and human rights, niceness becomes complicity.
• Roe kicked a user from the Nuxt Discord for using a Nazi-uniform avatar (twice), rejecting the ‘keep politics out of open source’ defense: technology does not exist in a moral vacuum.
• He explicitly names DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) as unwelcome in the Nuxt community, citing DHH’s statements that Black people aren’t ‘native Brits’ and his call for mass deportation of Roma people — views Roe says are being normalized because DHH builds popular tools like Omarchy.
• Roe calls on corporate sponsors 1Password and DigitalOcean to retract support for Omarchy, arguing that using a product is different from endorsing its creator’s hateful ideology.
• He invokes the paradox of tolerance: a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance without seeding its own destruction. His aside clarifies he speaks to values, not party politics — just as a scientist isn’t ‘political’ for defending accepted science against denial.
• Community response (41 replies, 729 likes on Bluesky) largely supports the stance, with commenters referencing Karl Popper, the ‘kind not nice’ distinction, and the difficulty of enforcing boundaries in person vs. online.