I’ve been talking to many people about the controversy with Reddit, why I left it and why I went onto Lemmy, Kbin and Mastadon instead. Some of my friends have commented that the control is still a problem as other platforms and it is all dependent on who owns the software, who owns the hardware, who are the admins, who are the moderators and which community or group has the most influence.
Who are these people that influence the most control on the fediverse? Are they Conservative? Are they Liberal? Are they Republican? Are they Democrat? Do they lean to the left of politics? to the right? or are they center? Are they even political? But also if they had to be would they easily or not so easily influenced?
So … for the ELI5 version of the question … Who owns the fediverse?
That would be exactly what I mean by “wither”. Lack of developers means a lack of updates.
OpenOffice updates are orders of magnitude less impactful than LibreOffice. Pretty much all the developers went with LibreOffice. OpenOffice still works, it’s still available, but it is much less vibrant. Much less, alive? Like it’s “withered”.
You could absolutely fork Lemmy, and of Lemmy improves it’s sorting, adds other features, tweaks, improvements, etc. your fork wouldn’t include those. If there was enough developer interest, your fork could parallel those changes, or it could even go in a different direction. Without developers though, it would just be stagnant.
Lemmy has two developers. Many AP projects run with just one developer. If someone’s project lacks one developer, that’s their choice to end the project. It’s not “withering due to a lack of developers.” It’s being closed entirely.