The Funkwhale music platform is alive and in active development, and they’re working on a feature to filter far-right artists off the network. Some Fediverse self-hosters are divided on letting a third party decide what should be allowed in their library.
It’s not even liberalism, it’s pragmatism. It’s simultaneously giving software as a commons and trying to restrict it, an extension of culture wars that’s so ineffective it gives the other side an easy win once they set up chudwhale as a script that forks the latest codebase but with no blocklist and a pepe mascot. Just time unspooling. I might be depressed.
I wouldn’t get too depressed about it, it would just be another niche bit of alt-tech if it were anything other than completely neutral. I can’t think of a case when an anti-left fork of a software was memorable as a self-hostable tool. The closest I can think of is Gab, which hardly qualifies, nor does it hold a torch to Mastodon.