The beauty of Mastodon is not only that it is free and open but that it’s federated. You can fork it without losing access to the network or your social graph. There’s no reason a hundred forks couldn’t exist.
Also, when did forking become an insult? As far as I’m concerned, it’s the biggest compliment you can pay a project. And if you fork and stay federated, you’re actually helping to strengthen the fediverse!
What you can’t do is force people to build what you want out of entitlement.
@aral Not sure about compliment part. Forking basically means "I like your project but I don't like the direction it is going and/or maintainers so I don't want to work with you - I want to work with your codebase".
Not all forks succeed, though. Not every parent project survives the fork. Sometimes one branch will be absorbed by the surviving branch, sometimes under the name of the parent, sometimes of the fork. There is risk and cost, yes. But generally it's a healthy process, in the way that doing work to move forward out of conflict is healthy.
This is reasonably well-trod ground, now, although it's fascinating to be able to watch a community come to the process with fresh eyes.
@Wraptile
... or maybe, "you won't do things the way we want you to, so we're going to do things the way we think they should be done".
And that's a fine thing.
Honestly, I look to the existence of healthy, functional forks as one of the firmest existence proofs that the upstream project is truly free, and lacks any hidden "secret sauce" that makes it forkable <*ahem*> in name only.
@aral