You’d be surprised, this has always been something of a weird schism within open source. There’s a synthesis between socialist and libertarian ideals, the overlap of which is broadly seen as a beneficial social good. So, you get contributors and users that fall on opposite ends of a spectrum. This is just as true for the Fediverse, only the dynamic is much more pronounced, because it’s a social network populated by people who got off of other social networks.

Technically, SoapBox and Rebased were forks of the Mastodon frontend and Pleroma backend by an alt-right dev that found some level of success in the alt-right part of the Fediverse. So, it’s not completely unheard of.

It’s basically an open source, federated clone of GrooveShark, which was kind of like Plex but just for music.

Yeah, the UX is historically not great. I’m also pretty sure that the federated social layer is still kind of non-existent at this point. It used to be that you could upload your own music and share it, but you’d never see replies from anybody.

It’s like someone took a Grooveshark clone, shoehorned federation into it, and then kind of made some features act like SoundCloud, if you squint. But, they didn’t really finish the transition.

Generally speaking, I agree. It’s just interesting to see a platform force a mechanism into itself that admins can’t turn off. The only thing that really bugs me about that is that admins are kind of supposed to have the final say on what their server does, and some of the infrastructure for this idea seems a bit shaky at best.