The beauty of Mastodon is not only that it is free and open but that itβs federated. You can fork it without losing access to the network or your social graph. Thereβs no reason a hundred forks couldnβt exist.
Also, when did forking become an insult? As far as Iβm concerned, itβs the biggest compliment you can pay a project. And if you fork and stay federated, youβre actually helping to strengthen the fediverse!
What you canβt do is force people to build what you want out of entitlement.
@aral
I have the feeling that people miss a important aspect if they suggest forks as a solution for the current "problem". A important part of long term success is building a healthy dev community. Hundreds of one-person forks aren't sustainable and will slow down progress. Think about a world where all KDE, Gnome or Linux devs would work on their own fork instead of working together. I hardly believe that this would result in a better and more sustainable ecosystem.
@bjoern @aral Agreed, however it can also be a healthy thing if the forkers are simply at odds with upstream and cannot peacefully cooperate. There's less of a problem with forks when federation is involved and they remain compatible. Also, most of the new features of Mastodon are still being developed by a single person, I don't think the fork is going to subtract from the Mastodon technical/contributor pool significantly. Also, they can also merge back in the future, see Node.js/io.js
@MatejLach @bjoern @aral Yes, the federation is the difference here. Activitypub is the core (or the KDE/Gnome here) and Mastodon is just one possible implementation. One of the applications that makes up the KDE.
Too big fragmentation is of course bad... but I don't really see much risk of it here.
@shellkr @MatejLach @aral The protocol is only the foundation, without any value if there are no implementations. Most likely ActivityPub would be already dead without Mastodon. In order to have good implementation(s) for many years to come you need a healthy (dev) community, and as said, that's not what one-person forks with a handful of users are, imho. I'd even go as far as to say, that forks as discussed right now could kill both Mastodon and ActivityPub in the long run.
@bjoern @MatejLach @aral Yes, you could be right if Mastodon was a single dev project... but it isn't. I think the last (some of the latest) version had like 20 contributors or something like that.
The typical issue with one man forks would be if Eugen burnt out or god forbid would experienced an accident and no longer capable to continue.
The thing here is that then a fork could continue as before.. Forks makes the "project" more resilient. It also prevents some of the pit holes.
