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
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 > Think about a world where all KDE, Gnome or Linux devs would work on their own fork instead of working together.

There are countless examples of successful forks for all of those.

GNOME -> MATE, Cinnamon, Budgie
KDE -> TDE
Linux -> Too many to list

@raucao
I think this are not good counterexamples. First (highly personal opinion) I would be surprised if most of the GNOME/KDE forks you mentioned would still exists in 10+ years as healthy and active projects. Second, non of them split up in multiple one-person projects, most devs stick to the "original", same for most users and distributions. I don't think Mastodon has a size that can handle it. When 15 of the 20 devs split up, sustainability is at risk
@aral

@bjoern @aral Regarding the examples, MATE and Cinnamon are wildly popular desktop choices! And I think it's completely irrelevant what the landscape looks like in 10 years time. Software is way too dynamic to even plan that far ahead. Not even speaking of forks being the normal modus operandi for all Linux kernel development.

@raucao
Well, if I think about healthy and sustainable projects I think at least in 10+ years. Projects like Gnome, KDE, Linux, GNU,... exist for much more than ten years, luckily. I also hope that Mastodon will exists much longer than ten years.
@aral

@bjoern That wasn't the point at all. It seems like you missed every single actual argument I made. Linux is forked by default. It's doing exactly what you fear they shouldn't do since they existed, and they literally invented Git in order to scale up forks to 7 commits per hour.

@bjoern The point is, what you say might be bad, is what made Linux so successful in the first place.

@raucao
I didn't followed the Linux development closely. But I think Linux was never and don't is in a state where it is spread across multiple one-person forks. Most development happens in the mainline, that's where all the companies contribute, and what most (all) distributions ship and with that also most users are using. If I'm wrong I would be curious for some pointers.