Yes, @heluecht , this is also how I feel. Eugen started the project, and brought years of dedication to it. He has practiced BDFL from the start (he’s even mentioned on Wikipedia for that), and people joined on that premise. In true FOSS fashion there’s the choice to ‘take it or leave it’. Or fork it, and he’s open about that too.
So, I won’t sign up to any open call for him to step down. Instead I’ll make a call to anyone disagreeing to Eugen to consider their options instead. And this includes myself, as - at the time I created the Humane Tech Community account (which has since become more personally affiliated to me) - mastodon.social seemed the most appropriate choice (hint: not anymore for me).
Still the open call has one Good Thing™ going for it: The discussions it triggers.
Some broader issues that could be addressed:
- Has Mastodon become too dominant on the Fediverse (in a ‘mail vs. Gmail’ kinda way)?
- Is this dominance helping or hurting the evolution of the Fediverse and its technology foundation?
- Is there a risk of the Fediverse ‘forking’, one part on a Mastodon track and another on the ‘standards’ track? Can we avoid that?
- If Mastodon is indeed so dominant, then what are the reasons for that? What can we learn from that?
- Why until now didn’t SocialHub/SocialCG manage to position firmly at the center of fedi evolution?
- How can we encourage Mastodon (and Eugen) to address some issues we may have with his projecct?
- If more forks of Mastodon arise (some already exist), how can we help set them up in most desirable way?
And there are many smaller issues that relate to things still missing in the standards & practices or lack of broad adoption. Many of these open-ended discussions in this forum.
(Like I would ideally move to a different microblogging app altogether, maybe Pleroma. But I don’t want to lose all followers when doing so, and my toot history. There’s network effects + FOMO that kept me stuck till now)
Update: I also copied this to Fediverse Futures on Lemmy.