I think you have some confusion with the word fork. You don’t “fork away” from a lemmy instance – instances are their own thing. You can defederate from them, but that’s not forking. Forking is really only in the context of the code – its when you copy a codebase and change it in whatever way you see fit, so a fork of Lemmy would not be lemmy.

That thread has a couple mentions of forks of Lemmy, like piefed and mbin, but there is so much non-technical conversation that its really not about creating forks of lemmy. I think what you’re trying to say is that people want to decrease their reliance (don’t want to donate to, really) the lemmy devs, who also are the lemmy.ml maintainers, who have pro-CCP views. I mean, you can correct me if I’m wrong there. Really most of that thread is discussion of politics.

But the thing is, you don’t have to support them. You don’t have to donate, and if you’re really upset that they are adding a donate button, you can move to another activitypub platform like piefed or mbin or whatever. I mean, you probably should be doing that since you seem so invested in this issue. It’d definitely be more effective protest – because the lemmy devs aren’t going to be ousted or anything like that. Lemmy is their project. The best thing you can do is move to a fork of lemmy. That’s the whole beauty of open source – if you don’t like it, there is a fork. If there’s no fork, you can fork it yourself (but that’s work).

But there’s not much you can do to influence the direction of lemmy as a codebase, and if the devs wretched political opinions outweigh the usefulness of the platform for you, you should just switch platforms. It’d be a bummer to lose your comment history, your moderator status, or whatever, but why would you care about that stuff if it contributes to something that is owned by some tankies you hate?

Idk, maybe something to think about. There are just a lot of avenues built into open-source software, and into the decentralized nature of the fediverse, that allow you an off-ramp. But sounding the alarm on a yearly donate button won’t influence the direction of lemmy because those two devs are in complete control of the codebase.

Hell, I’m looking at mbin now. kinda enticing…hmmmmmm…lol