From DHH’s long-winded keynote at Rails World 2026. He was bragging that Hey’s backend is so efficient because it’s written in Rust (which he hates and refuses to read).
I will downvote this, because I want less DHH content. That guys is racist and fascist, and he should not be given any mention.
I don’t really know who this guy is, but I had a friend send me a couple videos of him recently. I tried looking up his facism/racism and found a reddit thread from a few years ago that mentioned his list of “funny names” and his support of the Canadian truck driver protest. Is that the extent of his idiocy or has there been worse stuff since?
Edit: holy shit, just saw the nazi merch stuff, there has indeed been worse stuff since lol
I don’t know about the nazi merch, but this gives a good overview of one of his nazi blog posts https://paulbjensen.com/blog/2025/09/17/on-dhhs-as-i-remember-london/
Ain’t this the same guy who vibe coded a distro and somehow managed to land a shitton of money from that?
Basically started as a glorified bunch of dotfiles. Haven’t checked whether or not it’s actually a distro yet.
But yeah, bunch of rich people threw a couple million at him, presumably because he’s a racist and their interests align.
I really can’t imagine that being about his project, especially when there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of other critically-important and chronically under-funded open-source projects.
IMO it’s 100% who and 0% what.
A racist who went all-in on AI. That’s probably responsible for a lot of the investments - you can get Silicon Valley idiots to invest in anything right now so long as it has those two magic letters in front of it.
I think that’s the consequence of the money, not the other way around.
But yeah, bunch of rich people threw a couple million at him, presumably because he’s a racist and their interests align.
Turns out, being racist is also just a job.
Really shameful how nepotistic that whole field is. We really need better diversity in the racism, fraud, and quackery sectors, so that new innovators have a chance to develop
It’s a new distro in the same way that Minecraft with a texture pack installed is a completely different game.
Isn’t this all distros? I’ve heard arguments that the only defining feature of a distro is the package manager, as you can install and configure software packages identically. E.g you can make Kali from Debian, just from some settings changes and installing some packages.
The real work of maintaining a distro is maintaining the package lists (and ensuring none of the packages are broken, buggy, etc). So if you have your own package lists, it’s a distro. If you don’t, “it’s a distro” is a much weaker claim IMO.
I mean, there’s not really a clear definition, but if your distro has an upstream distro and the only difference between yours and the upstream is that you added a few packages and some config files, I would call that a community flavor at best, not a distro.
Take Bazzite for example. They don’t have their own package manager (well, they kind of do, but it doesn’t use their own repos to my knowledge), but the installation is so vastly different from the upstream repo (Fedora) that calling them a distro makes sense.
Or take Ubuntu. It’s just Debian with some new packages, or? No, it’s so vastly different from a base Debian install, including their own repos and builds of every package, that it’s definitely a different distro.
Omarchy, by contrast, it’s basically a set of packages and config files that you install onto Arch. Not a distro.
Same with Proxmox VE, but they don’t try to call it a distro. They call it what it is, a “solution”. That’s not a bad thing. It’s bad to pretend it’s a distro, like Omarchy does.
Proxmox Virtual Environment is an open source server virtualization management solution based on QEMU/KVM and LXC.
- Proxmox’ Wiki
Omarchy is a beautiful, fun & agentic Linux distribution by DHH.
- Omarchy’s GitHub.
Also: they assemble their own system Backend; Artix is a different distro from arch, because it uses a different init system (openrc instead of systemd + other choices), but manjaro isn’t, it’s just arch with a shitty toolkit (pamac).
I remember when HEY first came out, I got to try it and thought it was kinda useless. Defining an entire email service by the removal of one step from any other email service seems silly. (Coming from a guy who’s actually written a unique email service.)
I do appreciate some of the philosophy of Hey, like cherishing the human-to-human section of your inbox. But it’s simply not worth the price tag. Also now that DHH has proudly proclaimed he does not read any of the code, I don’t think it’s even worth it for free, if I’m gambling with my data. I just self-host Stalwart and Bulwark.
@hperrin @tatterdemalion email aliases are a ubiquitous feature, GMail and Outlook both support “plus” aliases e.g.
username+alias@gmail.comis treated as equivalent tousername@gmail.com.Though I prefer simplelogin.io or addy.io, both of which are email alias providers that connect with an existing email inbox (instead of having to create a whole new email account). I like how these are open-source. Port87 claims to have a “patented spam filter”—the whole concept of software patents doesn’t click with me.
Thats an extension not an alias
That’s correct, subaddressing is a ubiquitous feature. That’s not what I was talking about.
Port87 is built entirely around subaddressing. The “bare” address doesn’t even go through to you. It also labels email automatically based on the subaddress, and you can control setting per label, like mark-as-read and notifications. You can also have screening on any of your labels, so that only humans can email you there. Subaddressing is not an optional afterthought, it is required and how the system works.
Port87 does not have an inbox. (Which I found out while creating it is something that basically all open source email software expects to exist.) It has an “Aggbox”, which is not a real place, but a filter for which labels you want to see when you open the app.
Port87’s search box is, I would say, the most powerful email search feature of any email service. It’s nearly as powerful as a straight up SQL query.
So yeah, I would say it’s unique among email services.
Also, simple login and addy aren’t really email “providers”, they’re more accurately called forwarding services. Email provider, or officially “mail service provider”, is specifically the term for an email service that sends, receives, and stores email.
Legend.
Might I ask what options you support for email import/export, migration, and third-party clients?
Right now, only downloading single emails. This is an area I’d really like to improve on though. The single best option, and what I’ll be working on as soon as I’m done with mailing lists, is supporting IMAP. That will let you import/export mail directly, and give support for a bunch of third party clients. Unfortunately, because Port87 is very different than other email services, I’m going to have to write my own IMAP server. I have the spec printed out in a binder in my office, so I’ll be getting started on it pretty soon. That’s a big big project though, so realistically, it’ll probably be over a year, maybe two, before Port87 supports it.
