Franky, there are a lot of conflicting opinions in this thread. Historically, I’ve personally pretty much never locked or hid posts outside of benign reasons like closing spam or duplicates (and still don’t because I’m bad at moderating lol), and then people complained that people with shitty opinions were just taking over conversations on the forum.
So then we get more team members and moderators to step up and start cleaning things up around here, who are far better at doing so than I am, and we get people complaining that they’re being silenced and that arguments are ending up one-sided.
The unfortunate reality is that there isn’t a “correct answer” to this situation.
I think that there are valid complaints here, but I’m also hesitant to make a lot of changes for what I suspect is more of a vocal minority rather than feedback that’s representative of the entire community. Generally, I personally receive a lot of feedback about how our community is far more informative/nice/welcoming than other communities which I won’t name, and for the most part I agree, but drama (like this) seems to bubble up from time to time too. It’s tricky.
What I might propose to the @team is simply: If one of us is involved in some argument that is getting “heated” (say for example the NextDNS one between @ignoramous and @dngray), we should just ask another team member to handle it from a moderation perspective, instead of doing so ourselves. I feel like we have the resources to do this, so there’s really no reason I can think of to be performing moderation actions on a thread you’re personally already involved with.
I think this would prevent pretty much all the problems I personally have with the current state of forum moderation.
Are we really at your throat though? 
I think that you are mischaracterizing @dngray’s statements from the other thread here. When he’s talking about trying to move on from a specific topic, you’re describing that here as him telling you to “shut up.” When he’s asking for additional sources, you’re describing that as him insulting your intelligence or expertise.
Do I agree with everything @dngray was saying in that thread? Meh… not really, but at the same time I think you are reading too much into “meanings behind the words” that may not even be there.
The NextDNS thread was from 4 months ago and resulted in changes being made to the site anyways, so I’m kind of surprised to hear it’s still an issue. Is there something unresolved?
This advice is generally bad, which is why it is not on the website. The fun thing about the internet is that you can find counter-arguments to every single claim online. I can find a million resources like the one you have found which say to do VPN over Tor, and a million resources which say to do Tor over VPN, etc.
It may be the case that you should not use a VPN before Tor if:
- You are physically moving around to different networks, and
- You are successfully avoiding IRL surveillance, and
- You are successfully avoiding being fingerprinted by other means, like not connecting with the same device at these different locations, etc.
…because then using the same VPN at multiple locations could give you away. I don’t think most people have the resources to pull something like this off effectively though, so it is not a scenario I am particularly concerned about when writing this guide. Plus, even in this scenario using a VPN after Tor isn’t going to help you either, so the advice given in the talk is still bad.
I suspect that he gave this advice because at the time of the talk (2012!) HTTPS was not ubiquitous, and so the risk of a malicious Tor exit node was far greater. Today, person in this scenario would likely be best off not using a VPN at all.
In other media, The Grugq also argues against his own advice that you should use Tor first anyways, acknowledging that Tor usage being visible to your ISP can be riskier than using a VPN, which is exactly what we claim as well.
It is typically more challenging to add features to decentralized platforms, because doing so requires active buy-in from the entire user-base. For example, Facebook can add E2EE to everyone’s messenger with the flip of a switch, whereas XMPP hasn’t managed to get well-functioning E2EE off the ground in 20 years. Other examples: DNSSEC adoption among .com/.net domains still being in single-digit percentages, it took until 2019 to make HTTPS mandatory, etc.
One could argue this is a feature and not a bug, although as a noted XMPP hater myself I have to say I prefer a more centralized approach to development 
Since numerous people in this thread have done this, I have to say I dislike it when people quote the website to complain about something, while omitting sentences directly before or after their quote which elaborate on the thing they’re complaining about.
Just like other decentralized platforms, adding features is more complex for developers than on a centralized platform. Hence, features may be lacking or incompletely implemented, such as offline message relaying or message deletion.
Perhaps the website is not clear enough on what we actually mean though. I generally stand by the idea that every statement on the site is accurate, so when people complain that something is not it seems far more likely to me that the statement is simply misunderstood, which is absolutely possible.
There are a lot of statements/pages on the site that don’t (yet) live up to my personal standards of clarity, the types of communications page is probably one of them
I find it dubious that some lone internet commenter could do either of these things. Saying some guy on the internet is going to prevent people from doing something is like… I don’t know, saying a flat earther is going to “prevent people” from thinking the Earth is round or something. And just like how normal people are able to simply use their brains and deduce that the Earth is indeed round, I think that everybody here is perfectly capable of drawing their own conclusions about GrapheneOS or any other project, and are not going to base their opinions off those of a single random stranger.
I have seen zero evidence that GrapheneOS has suffered any “harm” outside of harm which is self-inflicted, and that will probably never change.
Regardless, Techlore is a completely separate project with completely separate moderation policies and practices, and so it is not helpful to bring up here. This would be best addressed on their forum instead.