Why fork Pleroma in the first place?

As many of you will be aware, back in 01/2022, there was something of a schism in the smallish group of Pleroma developers with no single cause in my eyes - it was the culmination of years of mounting tensions between two competing interest groups. Pleroma has ever been an uneasy alliance between "free speech" people and free software people, and as the project's creator aligned more with the former group over time, it was only really a matter of time before something acted as a catalyst to break the alliance.

I shan't elaborate too much on that schism here, but the catalyst was one developer who both aligned with the "free speech" group and refused to treat other developers with any sort of respect (whilst being a generally unpleasant person to boot) - this broke the developer group in two and spawned the short-lived "newroma" (see, at least I'm not that bad at naming).

[…]

Most of the developers that split off in the fork then went back to Pleroma, after a band-aid fix from the almost-never-present project creator.

I do not believe they have meaningfully reformed anything since the schism, and it's naught but a power vacuum waiting for someone to take up the mantle of maintainer again - given the track record of the above, I do not trust that whoever ends up winning that power struggle will be someone I wish to side with.

Thus, I'm doing it myself. With blackjack and anime music.

— https://coffee-and-dreams.uk/development/2022/06/24/akkoma.html