FOSS "just fork it" delusion

is this a common problem? are software maintainers in the east sufficiently committed to racial superiority that they can't work with people in the west?

This has so many characteristics of AI writing. I would be surprised if it was written by a human.

I mean, we can engage with the ideas, there was intentionality in prompting the AI for this output, after all.

But it is interesting how after you see a bit of AI written text, it becomes super recognizable as afterwards.

Seems like the author's only talking about the extreme end of the spectrum. Not every fork is attempting to replace the forked project. There are so many other lesser degrees.

You can fork something just for a fun or experimentation. You could have a use case that the project doesn't handle and you aren't ready or interested in contributing that solution (especially if you only need this for a one-off scenario or a short-lived project).

This could also apply to needs that your client or company has, but it's out of scope for the original project, so you make a private fork that you and your team maintain internally. It could be that you DO actually make this public (either initially or eventually) so other people who have the same need can benefit and possibly contribute.

It could even be that, over time, the amount of users of your fork convince the upstream project that there is a need for this use case. Maybe they decide to handle it themselves or maybe your fork merges back in with the upstream. Sometimes projects just can't say yes to certain things because they wouldn't want to/be able to implement, maintain and support it. Seeing that you and others maintain a fork for a non-trivial amount of time can establish the credibility that there is indeed someone who will maintain this.

If almost everybody thinks you're so insufferable that they don't want to interact with you, chances are, you are.

This has been a function of societies for as long as societies have existed, and addressing it requires honest reflection. In this case: "why is there such a huge overlap between people competent and willing to host federated social media servers, and people who don't want to be around me?"

Unfortunately there is a pervasive attitude amongst a certain personality type, that if someone criticizes them, then that someone must be wrong, and must be fought, no matter what. It's common enough to have ICD-10 diagnosis codes for it: Narcissistic Personality Disorder and/or Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

This is why I rarely try to change people's minds anymore unless they appear receptive to it: there's a good chance an overactive amygdala will see it as an attack and just make more work for me, wasting my time. It's easier to just talk to them about something else, or if they're being unnecessarily rude to people: not talk to them.

You might reflect upon your own short comment history (or your username) and judge for yourself what proportion is polite & respectful vs. rude & belligerent, and consequently whether the average person would want to try having a nice conversation with you.

Open-Source in its actuality is not a lot about community. It's about making sure other people have everything they need to be able to run and modify a specific piece of software. The fact that, usually communities form around this paradigm is a happy coincidence in my opinion. Additionally, another point on both you and OP are missing the point, is that the communities that are relevant to open-source are not communities of users, but communities of contributors.

And what OP is proposing is actually forced labour. Instead of people being free to work (and fork) to their heart contents, the implication exists that they're losing their time, and instead, should focus on "collaborating" with the existing community. Which frankly nobody in the history of open-source ever denied. Forks are last instance measures, where the steering of a project gets off the rails to a high enough degree to justify such a drastic measure.