Companies doing austerity internally to own the clean energy enjoyers
The most thriving mod communities are ones for games that have essentially been abandoned by their publisher. Bethesda is infamous for trying to integrate with its modding scene and personally I don’t care for it.
This is what buying from coop developers is like. You know that everyone involved has agreed that everyone else is essential to the creation of the game and that everyone receives a cut in one way or another.
I can’t imagine just opening a giant PR without having extensive contact and coordination with the maintainer. Almost any amount of incremental safe steps would be preferable to a giant PR, even with extensive communication. I once introduced fully strict typescript into a vanilla js codebase and it took dozens of small PRs to do so. It was made more complicated by the fact that it was a library, but still. The communication made the entire process smooth and let everyone be confident the changes were correct along the way. If I’d done it all at once without any coordination, it would have been faster for me, but at the cost of the maintainer’s sanity and time.
Unfortunately, ActivityPub isn’t really designed to scale in a way that a Discord alternative would require. The intended behavior for federation isn’t clear either. Matrix is already a mature federated chat server with dozens of clients including an official one. Building a Discord clone client for it would be a lot easier than rolling a whole new custom server.
Writing plain old JavaScript without a library or framework is nice while you’re learning. Too many people will learn a single framework and not have any idea what the underlying APIs are, so the transferable skills are minimal.