Fediverse

Not to downplay all the blood, sweat, and tears that have been shed while making the fediverse work, but if I may offer some unsolicited advice to the author of the linked post: Publicly airing out a team’s dirty laundry tends to be… counter-productive. Usually it’s best to “keep it in the family.”

In this case, we don’t know what’s going on in the original project owner’s life right now. The author of this post could have just said “hey all, we apologize for the inconvenience, but the original project appears to be abandoned, so we’ve forked the project with the intention of patching some of the known issues and adding some new features.” (insert GH link here)

Although the original project dies, this new project is born, and who knows—the original project’s owner might even show up again someday and start making meaningful contributions to the new project (or not).

I say all this without knowing the full history of this project, and I don’t mean to downplay the author’s frustration, just my two cents.

All of that said, in my mind this situation makes for an interesting case study on the pros and cons of different ownership structures for public/open projects.