"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw… existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement… "
You can have as many forks as you want, but that’s a software engineer’s solution to a social problem. Lemmy is the “name brand” now for ActivityPub based federated content aggregation, and it will be orders of magnitudes more difficult to get support for forks, both from a contributor and from a user perspective.
Just look at last year’s Twitter migration, and the sea of people complaining about Mastodon not having features they felt were a requirement for adoption, while also ignoring every other Mastodon alternative on the Fediverse that had everything they were looking for.
A fork can work but only if there’s actually a decent population willing to adopt the fork, and of course someone willing to make that fork (and capable of it). A fork made by a small group of people upset by one person’s 7-day ban is not going to become name brand unless they get other stakeholders onboard.
As I see it, there are three major ways a fork could gain significant standing among the community:
I honestly think any one of these is easily manageable by a handful of people in off time. Other parts of the fediverse of similar size are chock full of forks.
Good luck.
Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute. A fork would probably be a significant improvement as far as brand perception goes.