Watching this happen with F-Droid. A badly needed UI refresh is getting repeatedly watered down and delayed because one of the maintainers with veto power is a dinosaur who thinks people are gonna jump ship if the app looks more modern

Ironically, the dated UI is what makes me want to use third party clients like Droid-ify instead

Forking works, but it requires very serious problems on the main repo so that people will seek out a fork.

Most commonly it just stops getting maintained, or it gets bought out by a company.

You can always attempt to create a fork anyways, but you will probably spend more time advertising than actually working on the thing.

There are loads of far better Mastodon/Misskey forks in terms of features and privacy if you want a specifically trans themed fork of Misskey it's not even hard

FOSS conceived as an exercise in collective ownership is a lie. Instead of large companies, FOSS is ruled by a collection of petty tyrants

I noticed day one that mastadon/lemmy's code is basically feudalism (I am a serf on hexbear), the thing that was democratized was that anyone can become a feudal lord, and any serf can leave for another feudal lord. Neither perfect nor democracy, but in some strange technical sense, an improvement, maybe?

This reminds me of The Tyranny of Structurelessness, a great article about how organizations without formal power structures inevitably become oppressive.

Informal power structures are still power structures but the positions of power are not chosen in a democratic way. Popularity and perceived necessity to the organization are the only things that matter. Because leadership in informal power structures is taken not given, people who abuse power are more likely to end up in those positions.

How can this issue be mitigated? The current system of a (usually not so) benevolent dictator(s) is the model for all FOSS projects I know of, lemmy included. As you've touched on, this is not at all democratic. However, I don't know if there are any version control hosting platforms (gitea, forgejo, etc.) that work without the code being held in the iron fist of an authoritarian code monkey. Then there is the issue of who should be allowed to contribute; there needs to be a way of keeping out people who contribute malware, or from taking so much control that they themselves become a code tyrant without a king code monkey to spitefully swat down improvements.

Even if those issues are resolved, there is still the massive gulf in power between code monkeys and non-technical users. If none of the code monkeys deign to implement features or bug fixes that non-technical users want or need, then those users are shit out of luck. Another wrench is thrown into things when it's software that runs on a server and there are also sysadmins who could pull the plug at any time even if a democratic system was built into the software.

I guess what I'm getting at is: what is a way to make FOSS as anarchic as possible without opening holes that bad actors could easily exploit and without leaving users incapable of making code be beholden to the code monkeys? The main thing FOSS has going for it is that its governance isn't as shit as how tech companies would handle it, and that's a very low bar to get over.

hmm, this sounds familiar... whatever. such criticisms obviously are founded in nothing. coder maintainers just want to keep the project's course straight! disregard image /s

As long as they maintain federation, it should work pretty seamlessly i think.

You should ask directly to the peoples I linked for more info on the project, I just share because I think it's important, I don't know computer stuff.