After seeing itzzenxx's post, I immediately contacted Nyla and asked if everything was alright. To the best of my knowledge, our relationship ended in a very good and amicable place, so I wanted to check with her to make sure everything was still alright. See the first screenshot. She did give me permission to post these messages.

Later on in our conversation, she says that this situation is causing her so much stress and anxiety that she's unable to work on important personal things — things that she asked I keep private — and that she's having suicidal thoughts. See the second and third screenshots.

I dislike talking about the situation she's been put in because of this post but I want to highlight the very real effect it's having on the supposed "victim".

Nyla should have been contacted before this post went up so she could have given her side of the story beforehand. It is completely unacceptable that we had to jump through hoops to give her a voice on a trustworthy platform after the allegations were brought forth.

Whether or not you believe I should be cancelled and reported and such, I do ask that no one attacks itzzenxx. She was only trying to do what she thought was right. She had no insight into our relationship and saw none of the actual rapport between us so there was no way she could know how Nyla and I actually interacted; from itzzenxx's perspective, I was a creepy 22-year-old hitting on a 16-year-old. The reality is very different, but she was still right for calling it out given the information that was available to her. I do, however, believe that she should have done so in a more responsible manner (contacting the "victim" first).

I will leave @amolith@mk.nixnet.social up for transparency but I will no longer use it. I will switch to @amolith@nixnet.social and greatly distance myself from fedi; if you want to keep in touch, please contact me elsewhere.

I appreciate the words of encouragement (not necessarily support) from some of my friends here and I appreciate those of you who gave Nyla and me a chance to provide further details instead of taking itzzenxx's post at face-value.

I hope everything goes well in the future o/

I'm not going to address age differences according to different cultures because that's an argument that has been hashed out again and again and again and it ultimately means nothing. The culture Nyla and I live in is US culture, and according to US culture, this relationship was wrong.

I do, however, firmly believe our relationship to have been an exceptional one. As Nyla stated many times over in her own post, she is incredibly mature in many areas. She dropped out of school at 14 because of extreme stress and anxiety and immediately began working on becoming fully self-sufficient. She has undergone a battery of mental health evaluations from the court, from her therapist, and from her employers to prove that she is of sound mind and able to work professionally in the security industry at 16. She has been an active and very valued contributor to a large open source security-related project for multiple years and has now moved on to work for a proper cybersecurity company with Fortune 500 clients. She is an EXTREMELY exceptional individual and absolutely does not deserve to be treated like a child who can't make her own decisions.

Again, she is incredibly mature in many areas; in some ways, she has FAR surpassed me. In other ways, she is still a 16-year-old girl and that did end up causing issues in our relationship. Towards the end, I planned to break up with her myself if things didn't improve after a couple of weeks. I didn't have to, however, because she noticed it as well and decided to end things first. I accepted without argument, and while I was devastated about losing a close companion, I knew it was for the best and it honestly felt like I was dodging a bullet.

We did have a pleasant relationship though. We talked about keyboards and gaming mice and Thinkpads and Linux and security, troubleshooted our YubiKeys together, she helped me improve my email server, I provided her with email accounts when she wanted to change her public pseudonyms, we edited Wikipedia pages together, I helped her with Linux stuff when she asked and gave her remote access to a physical rack server sitting in my bedroom, we talked about philosophy and ethics and morals and so much more. It was a genuine relationship with deep intellectual discussions, not some fetishised and hyper-sexual relationship.

Nonetheless, deciding to date her was absolutely a mistake and one that I adamantly decided not to repeat directly after the relationship ended. I do sincerely believe that the relationship was acceptable from a moral and ethical standpoint, but there were many issues caused by maturity differences that neither of us expected going into it. It was a bad decision that will not be repeated.

This is necessary context, please read it first
https://plma.plus.st/notice/AMjg5hfCbcMb1DwaYK

@kaia@brotka.st suggested that she give @nyla@brotka.st a voice on her server, brotka.st, because I have no control over it. We went through a multi-step verification process to prove to Kaia I do not own that account; what that account says are Nyla's own words. We connected Nyla's previous fedi profile to a GitHub profile that includes commits from before we started dating with "Signed-off-by: {email address}" trailers. Kaia sent the account credentials to that address and Nyla replied from it, further confirming its authenticity. Please read their posts before continuing.

Kaia's verification post:
https://brotka.st/notice/AMlAPSNRFzcWETcuwq

Nyla's split posts:
https://brotka.st/notice/AMlER681Lc2ncpS9nk
https://brotka.st/notice/AMlESH2CHhlFjuI2MK

Now for my posts.

When we first started talking on fedi, I was not aware of her age. She was a developer of some software I was using and had expressed interest in assisting me if I had any issues. She was very helpful and kind and patient. After a little while, she asked if there was somewhere off-fedi that we could chat because DMs were awkward, so we moved the conversation to Telegram. She immediately enabled auto-deleting messages with a week-long retention period, and at the time, I didn't think anything of it; she's very privacy- and security-minded and it makes sense that she wouldn't want messages to stick around. Later on, we moved to XMPP.

When she mentioned that she was 16, I immediately paused and said we needed to talk about that. After a long, multi-day discussion, we decided to continue with the relationship. Prior to this, we had already established that there was no chance of doing anything physical for a couple of years and I didn't mind waiting, so legal ages of consent for sexual activity were moot. However, as the fediblock post addresses age of consent, I will too. In my state, it's 16. In her state, it's 18. If we had been together physically in my state, it would have been completely legal. If it had happened in her state, it would not. But again, legality of physical sexual activity is a moot point because nothing physical occurred. The actual issues at hand are the cultural moral and ethical concerns with a 22-year-old dating a 16-year-old and the inherent relational power imbalance.

My primary concern was facilitating Nyla's post. She's in a terrible state right now because of all this. Now that she has said her piece, I'm going to work on my own.

@Wardyn@youjo.love fuck off

I'll publicly respond to it in the next couple of days.

Hell no ​:ablobcatheadbang:​
https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fonts-hell-no.html

@aster@akko.disqordia.space i've never even used conda ​:gura_laugh:​

I HATE PYTHON

this language is a joke
its package manager even more

@wetsocks@mk.disqordia.space i like go ​:gura_comfy:​

POSIX shell > Go > C > C# > Java > F# > .NET Visual Basic

@martijn@ieji.de apparently yes ​:woozy_bread:​

​:cirno_uwu:​
https://todo.sr.ht/~amolith/public-tracker/8

i should probably add tests at some point ​:cirno_thinking:​

motivation to work on my URL shortener finally struck ​:cirno_uwu:​

❯ git diff --shortstat
 9 files changed, 58 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)