Why I was banned from GrapheneOS by Daniel Micay

By Michael Altfield, on August 19th, 2025

Why was I banned from GrapheneOS? That’s a good question.

Anyone who follows me on GitHub knows that I make a lot of contributions to many different open-source projects, especially security-related ones.

A couple years ago, I wanted to try-out both GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, but I found that a niche security feature that’s very important to me hasn’t been implemented in either ROM, so I opened a friendly feature request ticket in both ROM’s repos:

My feature request for GrapheneOS

My feature request for CalyxOS

Neither ticket got much traction. There was some discussion on the CalyxOS ticket. But the GrapheneOS ticket was closed by Daniel Micay (Lead Developer of GrapheneOS at the time) 5 hours after I opened it. I forgot about it.

A year later, someone commented on the GrapheneOS ticket (it was the first and only comment other than Micay’s) expressing interest in my feature request, including some useful information: an implementation (that was blocking the CalyxOS ticket) was already written by LineageOS.

When I saw the comment in my email inbox (and realized it might unblock the feature getting added to CalyxOS), I got excited. I tried to load the ticket in GitHub so I could get more information and link it to the Calyx team, but I was surprised to see that the ticket was suddenly — within hours of the new comment — deleted. The ticket wasn’t locked; it was deleted.

Screenshot of a web page that says "This issue has been deleted."

I assumed the ticket was deleted by mistake because — why else would it have been deleted?

First I tried to email the commenter to ask them if it was deleted for them too, but their GitHub account had no contact info. GitHub doesn’t have DMs, so I figured the only way I could communicate with them was by creating a new ticket somewhere and @ tagging them. But where?

I also hopped-over to wayback machine. Internet Archive scraped the page the day that I submitted it (a year ago). I wasn’t sure if the ticket was deleted by accident (maybe Micay accidentally clicked the wrong button?), but — combined with the IA and the email from GitHub with the latest comment, I figured I would just clone the repo, create a new ticket there, use it to [a] contact the most-recent-commenter and [b] also use it to serve as an archive of the now-deleted ticket’s contents for both myself and others.

So I cloned the repo and created the following issue, which I just copied-and-pasted the info from the old ticket to the new ticket. I also asked the most-recent-commenter to confirm if they had the same “deleted” message as me. And I asked Daniel Micay if he had maybe accidentally deleted the ticket, and if he could please re-open it.

Screenshot of a GitHub ticket where "maltfield" asks "thestinger" to please undelete the ticket, if it was deleted by accident

I asked Micay if the ticket was deleted accidentally and, if so, if he could please undelete it

The dialog that followed was mind-boggling. ^[1]

https://github.com/maltfield/os-issue-tracker/issues/1

Unfortunately, an hour or so after Micay banned me, they began deleting their own comments from the ticket. Fortunately I still had a tab open with the comments that Micay wrote, so I captured a screenshot (mirror 1) (mirror 2) and also updated all my comments with full quotes of the messages that I was replying-to (since now it just looked like I was talking to myself).

Screenshot of the (public) dialog between “thestinger” (Daniel Micay) and “maltfield” (Michael Altfield) where Micay attacks and bans Altfield (click here to see the full screenshot)

Not Micay’s first attack

Unfortunately, it seems I’m not the first person to be attacked by Daniel Micay. I won’t bother enumerating the long chronology of such events, because at least two credible YouTubers have already done this:

Conclusion

In general, I think banning someone from any community is not something that should be taken lightly. If someone ever asks me why I can’t contribute to GrapheneOS, I wanted to have something to point-to to show them why. That is the purpose of this post.

To date, I’m not really sure why I was banned from GrapheneOS. But it seems that Micay is hostile to [a] archiving their (public) tickets, and [b] linking to an alternative ROM (which Micay claims is indirectly responsible for harassing and attacking them).