The Trouble with Forking Mastodon
The Trouble with Forking Mastodon
In recent weeks, people unhappy with Mastodon project talked about forking the project in a different direction. It's harder than it looks.
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
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It's interesting to see how challenging it is to fork Mastodon while Misskey must have 10 active forks at the moment
Misskey is a little bit odd, in the sense that there's constantly new forks in various stages of development. New forks emerge just as quickly as old ones die off.
It may be that the frontend and backend both being written in one language helps make the system easier to hack on. I can't say for sure. What's weird is that some of these forks go in really odd directions, like rewriting the whole backend in a different programming language.
The other thing is that, despite their proliferation, the effort is somewhat fragmented into all of these little projects. I'm not sure how viable any of these forks are in the long term.