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 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.