cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5257349
Fore some times, mastodon has been unsafe for black and other minorities users, the peoples impacted by this have been complaining about it openly, emphasizing the lack of good moderation tools to make instances safer. The 
s on the dev team and userbase however have essentially plugged their ears and refused to listen, and instead engaged in bad faith, tone policing, minimizing racism, dismissing the testimony of black users, and telling them to “curate their experience better” with filters and blocks (even though a big part of the complaint is that this doesn’t work).
Seeing this, some black peoples who have been complaining about racism on mastodon and the lack of security features to deal with it have taken things in their own hands and made a fork of Mastodon named Awujo.
As long as they maintain federation, it should work pretty seamlessly i think.
I’m talking about development of the code. “Maintaining federation” means pulling in most of the changes from the main Mastodon sources, and they said it’s a “hard fork”, so it seems like they’re going to be creating a lot of work for themselves. It would have to get a lot of support for the devs to not just get burned out or demotivated if a bunch of the work is just maintaining compatibility.
There are already a bunch of mastodon forks/alternative AP implementations anyway. Misskey, gotosocial just off the top of my head.
It’s hard to convey how dysfunctional the mastodon FOSS project is beyond just linking you to see the number of un-merged pull requests.
Every open source project is dysfunctional.
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The Linux kernel project has an incredibly high barrier to entry, Linus has had to take anger management classes, lots of maintainers are burnt out, and they had a lot of drama over a Code of Conduct.
Just because the software quality is good, doesn’t mean the culture isn’t dysfunctional