I think there may be some misunderstanding on what constitutes “the community” and what “force applied” mean in this context.
In any self-governing body, there are written and unwritten rules of conduct. Nobody has any power or ability to force anyone to stay and participate in the community at all, so they literally have no power to force anyone to do anything. The only power they do have is conditional, and boils down to, “Anyone that wants to participate in this project must conduct themselves and their work by the guidelines we dictate.”
If there is a rift, and there is not consensus on what those guidelines should or should not contain, the smaller or less contributing group is no longer “conducting themselves and their work by the guidelines we dictate”, so their contributions are no longer accepted. The out group has not been forced to do anything at all, and is free to copy the project at the point of contention and take it in the direction of their own vision, setting up their own code of conduct and submission rules.
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
This is certainly an opinion, but here is a list of major projects that have a code of conduct: opensourceconduct.com/projects . How well those projects enforce their CoCs, idk. But they are applied, otherwise they wouldn’t bother writing out a CoC.
Software development is not the only place which holds people to standards. The realm of criminal and civil law, education, and business all hold people to standards, whether those people like it or not. In fact, it’s hard to think of any realm that allows opt-out for standards, barring the incel-ridden corners of the web.
Starting any project – as in, inviting other people to join in – is distinct from just publishing a public Git repo. I too can just post my random pet projects to Codeberg, but that does not mean I will necessarily accept PRs or bug reports, let alone even responding to those. But to actually announce something, that where the project begins. And to do so recklessly does reflect poorly upon the maintainer.