Building a resilient, safe, longterm-viable communities is the metric to measure fedi by.
100% agree, especially on the resiliency part.
A community with 100 users but will never die is much better than one with a million users but might kick the bucket anytime.
The way the Fediverse works, and assuming that not everyone goes to the same instance, then it will be pretty much guaranteed to exist as long as there are users. And this is huge in terms of community building.
Why would we need to fork the software? It’s AGPL-licensed. Code changes and related discussions are public. And for now there’s no signs of the maintainers pushing their political opinions in the software itself, they just do that on their own instances (and it’s not like they’re hiding that, I mean their choice of TLD is a political statement in itself, do people think “ml” stands for “markup language” or something?).
Until they start messing with the code (which is something that is not going to go unnoticed), there’s absolutely no reason to fragment development efforts, that would just be counterproductive.