@astraluma

no, the amount of time and effort required to manage a mastodon fork for a large number of active users is not sustainable unless you are getting paid to do it as your literal job, and the only person really getting paid to do it as their literal job is eugen. unless we (the fedi community) can secure both a line of credit and a meaningful organizational structure to drive fedi development, we will be stuck with eugen as BDFL who calls all the shots. all attempts at doing this so far (Mastodon Community Edition, Florence, etc) have failed due to some combination of lack of commitment and/or sabotage by people who don’t have fedi’s best interests at heart. it’s true that people don’t like eugen BUT they don’t dislike him ENOUGH (or care about fedi enough) to do the hard work necessary for a different, sustainable development pattern.

caveats:

• well‐managed forks exist (e·g Hometown) but they are just upstream with a few changes (and consequently are still subject to eugen’s whims)

• you can get weirder and more interesting stuff maybe with instance‐specific forks (e·g at glitch.cat.family we run our own fork) but the scope of those projects is necessarily small (and even so it’s hard keeping them up‐to‐date)

• there are other forks with significant numbers of users (GlitchSoc) and also other federated softwares entirely (Pleroma, MissKey, etc…) but they aren’t any better at managing a foss project, they’re just smaller or more niche and have a self‐selecting userbase (you don’t run GlitchSoc unless you already like what it does for example)