@alyssa @gaditb what’s bothering me, and this is a more general Bother with tech, is that there doesn’t seem to be a space for trans women to develop their own products in their own community without it needing to go thru the gauntlet of universal approval or criticism. i look at projects like Zig, or Servo (not a programming language, but probably the complexity of one), and they are not large teams. there is the knowledge and numbers to do a project of that size and have a little community around it. but it feels as tho unless it will also be as welknown and used as Zig or Servo, which is unlikely because of all the reasons you mentioned, people are not willing to consider it. or there is a networking problem, where people are willing to consider it but not willing to work together to make it happen

tl;dr here is i don’t want something successful, i want something i can write small libraries for which are good and useful without ultimately supporting Apple, or the Rust Foundation, or some random cis male BDFL, which is what most of the options feel like to me. there are things like C or JS which are more neutral (as committee-driven standards), but conversely have no real community to speak of (at least not good ones), which feels alienating to labour under

a project doesn’t need to be very successful to fill that niche. it’s just depressing and demotivating working in a field where everything you produce is enhancing the product of someone else, and most of those someone elses aren’t people you would otherwise want to prop up. i don’t think i’m the only one who feels this way, but if the sentiment is shared, it doesn’t feel like anyone is actually capable of acting on it