@prologic@twtxt.net This might be a bit of a stretch, but anyway:
You could compare the situation to Git and GitHub. Git itself is free software and all that, just like twtxt. GitHub is not.
There are many incentives to use GitHub over plain Git on your own server. Once critical mass is reached, you are basically required to have a GitHub account, just so you can work with people who host their stuff there. And boom, you have a “monopoly”. It’s not a “strict” monopoly, but for mere practical reasons it basically is. You’ll be having a very hard time if you wanted to fully avoid GitHub.
Note that this isn’t the same as “making Git proprietary” (or twtxt, for that matter). The point is (I’m quoting from a Google translation of his blogpost): “… then close the protocol to force users to stay on the proprietary platform.” It doesn’t matter if Git/twtxt itself is free if users are effectively forced to use a proprietary service.
Yarn.social and twtxt are a looooooong way away from this. But I have to admit that I can somewhat understand what @lucidiot@tilde.town is thinking. To be honest, I had similar doubts in the beginning (didn’t we have a discussion about that? 😅). Those doubts are long gone, because I now believe that you’re a good guy – but they were there.
I think it’s normal, at least for purists/minimalists/nerds, to have these kinds of doubts. I don’t take that as hostility from @lucidiot@tilde.town.
Regarding “should we fork”: It could be beneficial to Yarn.social to fork. Get rid of some historical baggage and end discussions like these once and for all. But I reaaaaaally hope that you don’t fork. 😅 For the reasons outlined in this old posting on nixers.net, I will not run yarnd myself. twtxt’s simplicity of just hosting a text file is a killer feature for me.
To end on a more positive note: If it weren’t for the threading extensions of Yarn.social, I doubt that I’d still be an active user. Automatic threading is super important, for me at least. 🥳