Right, tech is never “just tech”, it’s political. Fully agreed. So remind me where it says you have the right to make someone else stop working on something they’re building?

If the sternly-worded letter doesn’t work, what next? Should we shackle his hands to make sure he can’t type? Do you also take a kid’s Legos away if you don’t like what they’re building? Heck, even that isn’t a good analogy because the kid probably didn’t mold and craft the Legos himself.

*still smh*

I haven’t read the letter, but a call for resignation is most definitely an act for the politics of the thing rather than the code. As such it feels disingenuous to me to simply insist someone fork the code. What are all the non coding contributors to do? Do they not get a say in the culture of mastodon just because their contribution area doesn’t have the mechanisms necessary to fork?

Is it a silly demand for an open source project? A bit. But that doesn’t make the people making the demand silly or drug users/addicts. For many people Mastodon is their first or only experience of the fediverse and/or open-source.

How do we build a community around the fediverse such that we can collectively push for changes when and where they are necessary? Does it produce a vibrant and healthy community if the only or main way to address leadership we don’t agree with is to build our own camp/software? Seems like a lot of repetition of effort to me.

Cool, if it’s your project, please keep building it and thank you for your contributions.

You cannot – and neither should you be able to – stop anyone else working on it (or a fork of it).

since he doesn’t seem to like those timelines but a large part of his users do i think’s it’s not absurd to ask for him to deliver. He’s the one wanting mastodon to rise and gain more users. Yet he doesn’t really listen to his userbase.

Not all folks here are developers, we can’t all just fork. And maintain the new software. He has the skills, the funds, and the human ressources.

oh and btw i like how he says that public timelines are features for techy people and yet forgets that “decentralized-platform” (which is his main argument for mastodon) also is a feature for techy people

But that’s another topic

And no one is forcing anyone to use anything.

It’s a huge leap from “you can’t force anyone to use what you make” (agreed, entirely) to “stop working on your app because I said so” (which is what the open letter demands).

People are very invested in Mastodon already. The only alternative is a lot of effort to move to new software with risks.

So asking him to stop being a tyrant is the first "do less harm" step.