@varx Yeah, I was being a bit facetious :)

But, one could kind of make the point that Mastodon is not just a software project, but also a set of social standards ("A more humane approach" in its own words) that is not necessarily shared by other parts of the Fediverse / things that speak ActivityPub, and so refers to that subcommunity. But, I think that view might not give enough credit to those other parts; Mastodon doesn't have a monopoly on discourse.

Anyway, I think too much.

As a concrete example of peaceful co-existence of forks: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD have different philosophies, but they swap patches all the time.

In fact, it seems eminently possible to have a fork of a project which *doesn't* have any technical changes, only governance changes. At least, not any major ones. Different design goals means, some features from the other fork(s) you'd adopt, but others, you'd leave out.

Don't think of it as a fork, think of it as a distro...?

Eh, reading that over now, it sounds like it came out all wrong.

By "manifesto" I only mean, a list of project goals.

And a dictatorship, in this context, is not *automatically* a bad thing.

But the larger an open-source project gets, the more users it has, the more it benefits from some form of governance; and the basis for that governance is communicating the project's goals clearly and explicitly, so that they can be shared goals.

Or:

Tired: Code is data (von Neumann architecture)
Wired: Code HAS TO BE data at some level; otherwise, you can't execute it!

Every CPU implements the Command Pattern.