Modded Minecraft

You are absolutely the kind of person I'd expect to find using Lemmy instead of Reddit. It's good to see someone fairly reputable in the modding space over here.

Hi! Nice to see you over on the little corner of Lemmy I carved out for this niche. Hopefully the transition goes off without too many issues. One thing I've been wondering is whether changes from 1.20 to 1.21 NeoForge will be enough to have a bottleneck effect like the 1.13 and 1.8 changes had on previous versions, but it might be too early to tell. Best of luck on the new project!

My bet is something overly technical that nobody cares about, but that it piled up with LexManos' shitty behaviour over the years and became the last straw, making cpw leave. And if people had to decide between LexManos and cpw, they'd rather follow the later, even if the project is under LexManos' control, so they had to fork it. (That's just my bet, mind you.)

And frankly... LexManos is only the lead Forge developer because everyone else left. Forge started from Eloraam (from RedPower), SpaceToad (from BuildCraft) and FlowerChild (yes, that one - from Better than Wolves). Then Eloraam brought LexManos in, Eloraam and FC fought because Eloraam was "your mod has this feature? GOTTA HAVE IT IN REDPOWER 2!", SpaceToad eventually disengaged, Eloraam started focusing more and more on RP2, and... LexManos was left with the grunt job, the modding scene equivalent of the almight janny.

If you remember the drama back when Fabric came around or even before then: the head developer of Forge has been what the youfs call a “discord moderator” for a long time. A petty tyrant stifling innovation and using his stranglehold on the entire Minecraft modding community to suppress competition and simply people he doesn’t like. The behavior was tolerated because no alternative was developed/popular enough to gain influence.

Not sure what the final straw was though. Perhaps a critical mass of mod devs escaping to Fabric.

I tried being nosy and went to the discord server. From what I can gather within the official discord, it seems likely a similar situation to former Minecraft mod loaders drama. Weird, intercommunity drama and general disagreements about the future of the project resulting in a massive split. It seems that there was discussion of potentially improving upon the code of forge and having it run smoother and maybe incorporating an existing project (sodium it seems?) and if such suggestion was actually incorporated that would have potentially disrupted the forge main download site's ability to generate ad revenue, and such suggestion apparently morphed into tension that had been seemingly brewing for months. Apparently, the guy they parted ways with was given the forge project and basically owns the rights to the name, website, ad revenue on the website, and is in control of community donations. All of it seems like a hot mess regardless, but we will see what the truth is in time I presume.

Take what I'm saying with a grain of salt though, I could be completely wrong.