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@gattsuru, please correct me if I’m missing something.
Quilt is a fork of Fabric, one of the main modding tools for Minecraft. It split in part because of drama involving ”plurality,” or multiple personalities in one body. The issue was not so much that concept as it was the moderation response to criticism, but I’m less clear on the specifics.
I think plurality/multiplicity/headmates pushes the boundaries of “new behavior.” Or rather—it is adequately described from the outside as an adopted behavior, but proponents will fight tooth and nail to tell you that’s not the case. That their personalities have distinct values and goals, and must not be treated as an affectation. They may benefit from social accommodations such as xenopronouns or discord bots.
One thing led to another, and Quilt seceded to make their own modloader, with blackjack and redesigned moderation. My understanding is that this involves a lot of workflow and API improvements, too, and is not just a political maneuver. In theory it’s the free (-open-source-software) market in action: if you don’t like the management, head out and make your own improvements.
In practice, critics view it as the continuation of politics by other means. Technical improvements made by Quilt are inseparable from its weirder stances. I have no idea how the cost-benefit works out for the broader Minecraft modding community.
I'd caveat that Quilt mostly split over more conventional trans-specific Culture War. If you want the exact background, here and here (cw: discussion of suicide) are the Quilt-favorable perspectives on the events, though I'll caution that they're a long and very inside-baseball read.
((Also some even more boring problems related to bikeshedding: literally a year of Fluid API attempts.))
The increasing recognition of multiplicity/plurality stuff seems to have been a downstream effect of evaporative cooling and a few of the early Quilt coders (I think gdude? and silver?) being plural or plural-adjacent, and having roles early on that made it easier to bring up or turn into community rules or norms. But afaik the whole thing was little more than a curiosity for Fabric even early into the split.
In the end, both Quilt and Fabric are a bit of a rounding error for total users: the biggest Quilt and Fabric mods gets tiny download counts, and those are often straight clones or ports of their Forge equivalents. There's interesting stuff happening in places, but they're more for the programmer and friends than a general category of users.
There's a not-implausible argument that they've encouraged better behavior from LexManos and Forge -- at the very least, Forge is a lot more willing to work with people now than in the 1.7-1.12 era, especially for ASM/mixins -- but at the same time the increasingly fractured community makes it hard to work or onboard newcomers. I've got hopes that Quilt may try to solve a few dependency problems (mostly resolution, but also a variant of the diamond problem) that wouldn't be possible for Forge to force or practical for Fabric's design team, but it hasn't really done that yet.
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