It's been a year since this post
elekk.xyz/@maloki/101501797285504130 which was criticizing Mastodon and saying that "Fork Off" was going to actually be a project, after a lot of past hype and failed promises.
Since then, I think they've realized that actually, managing an open source project is difficult, and getting programmers to add the features you want is difficult. Their last pre-release (no releases at all) was in August 2019, still being based off of Mastodon 2.9.
Here is a list of all of the features they have added in the past year:
* configurable toot and biography lengths (copied from glitch social)
* users can get dm's on their home timeline if they choose to (copied from glitch social)
* more formal spanish translations
Of course, most of their commits are towards "improving" their code of conduct. Looks like they worked on it so much they didn't have any time for actual coding - I wonder why all the minority members who felt unwelcomed didn't show up, as promised?
You can have your "working groups" and discussions and meetings but at some point you need to actually do coding - having a team of community managers doesn't get you anywhere. At least Mastodon has managed to add features in the past year.
Although, thinking about it, the backlash that lead to this project was over Gargron adding a feature (trending hashtags) that people disagreed with - so maybe stagnation is the goal here.