Python is for some reason darling of many, sometimes it has almost religious connotations. Meanwhile differences from e.g. PHP are mostly superficial and each has their strengths and weaknesses.

Bourne shell is orders of magnitude worse clusterf*ck than JavaScript, yet it’s rarely criticized.

Rust rarely gets criticized which isn’t necessarily a problem, since it’s IMHO a good language for its intended use case. But people tend to recommend it for things where the trade offs come out negative. (apps not needing max. performance)

In general I wouldn’t follow the trends on social media, it’s all a huge groupthink, mostly focusing on (easily avoidable) warts, and ignoring strengths.

Swallowing your pride, merging into another project and taking a less glamorous role in that project is not as easy as it was to fork when steering your project.

I don’t think it’s because of the ego. But if you’re working with other people, you need to do a lot of non-coding (non-fun) things. Align thinking, find compromises, establish and follow processes. Things are easier and more fun hacking alone. No processes to limit you, no one telling you “this doesn’t align with the vision of the project” (and the other way round - you don’t have to maintain code contributed by other people with use cases not interesting to you) etc. For volunteer FOSS contributors, doing fun stuff is often a big part of the motivation to give their free time to the community.

I agree. Rust has advantages, but none of them outweighs the negatives (complexity, difficult to find devs) for this particular use case.

I also agree that JVM would be a good platform. It’s both performant enough and simple/conventional enough.

has documentation which says it is meant only to be used for logging / debugging

No, it’s not a breaking change IMO. The method contract (the “debug” name, the comment) heavily implies the output may change and should not be relied upon.

An instance hosting a community might

become unstable
disappear forever
defederate or become defederated from/by my instance
same for the instances of other users of that community

I kind of get this, but:

• it seems premature to split the community “just in case”
• this is largely a technical problem. IMHO communities should be federated in the sense that losing the instance shouldn’t automatically mean the community is lost.

Communities can have the same topic, but differ in moderation style policies regarding if and how bots are allowed

Also possible, but in most cases a large majority of community members can certainly agree on some compromise.

Why are communities split? If you’re right and there’s really no good reason, then how comes this phenomenon occurs so often?

• the lack of community federation
• “my instance is better than yours” - which IMHO originates again from the lack of community federation
• some mods just like the unrestricted power over their fiefdom

Hmm, what was the reasoning for the force reopening?

I think the mods of the duplicate communities should join forces, agree on uniting the communities and close all but one (the other pointing to the united one).

I don’t think there’s really a good reason to keep communities split. (there are of course contingencies where it makes sense, like rogue mods etc.)