A very direct answer to any "Why not just fork X?" question is, would you want to develop and maintain the fork in your free time and for no pay? Forking any project is deeper than just copying a repo and then making a few changes.

This would involve finding a group of people intimately familiar with the codebase who also don't mind committing all of their free time to development.

When you fork a project, you also lose whatever payment/donation structure the original project had setup. Asking for some kind of payment to develop a larger project should not come as a surprise. You want to be able to attract halfway decent developers and they want their work to be valued. Beyond just approving PRs, you need a team to verify additions and work out all the conflicts and errors that arise.

There very well may be a lot of settings people all agree on. But who is going to bite the bullet and put in all the time to add those features, potentially for the fork to be abandoned?

I hope this doesn't sound condescending because it's not intended to be. I'm just trying to explain that the scope of "Just do this" is a lot larger than what it first seems.

I'm still a fairly new member, and for the most part, Beehaw has required the least amount of pruning to create a timeline of content I actually want to see. Being on the sidelines and hearing how the Lemmy devs have reacted to various issues, it sounds like they are very emotionally immature and most likely will drive the platform to be "open" in their own interpretation.

I appreciate the hard work that the mods and admin team here do and it seems like the goals of Beehaw and Lemmy have become antagonistic towards each other. I still haven't seen any really good implementations of the fediverse in general, so I have no loyalty to that ecosystem.

I think you guys know what you are doing and are smart enough to pick the best platform if that will ultimately make your lives easier. I don't think Beehaw should feel like a job (and especially should not require the hours of a job), so I'd support moves that would actually make it a fun project. On Lemmy, it seems like there are a lot of barriers keeping the project from being enjoyable.

One of the things I like about Beehaw is the lack of bot posts in every thread. Personally I think all bots should be banned because it eliminates some unwanted spam, but a good compromise for me is that bots be explicitly labeled, and can only respond to a trigger command. Nothing that auto posts.

Seconding this and wanted to add:

It's more or less the repo owner's job to keep the codebase organized. So if they created a set of standards, follow them. If not, submit as clean a PR as you can.

That's a very good setting. Thanks! My only other concern is unlabeled bot accounts but I don't know if that's a rampant issue or not.

A lot of good explanations here. Thanks everyone!