For folks who are new to the inner sanctum of this project, let's start with a little background. I created the project. My goal was not to force my opinions or philosophy on anybody, but let them decide which direction the project should move and what it should accomplish. There aren't many policies or rules; and my goals have simply been to create software with transparency and ethics and try to perform many of the tasks which have traditionally been hard for decentralised networks and keeps them from competing with the centralised players. Communication is easy, privacy is hard. Big data is hard (directories, suggestions, etc.). Anyway I believe I've done more than most of my peers in these directions, but these accomplishments are difficult to describe to people who have always had them on centralised networks and aren't impressed at all. I've thrown in opinions here and there, but ultimately I always saw my role as a facilitator and an enthusiastic developer, not as a manager.
Many people secretly desire a pet programmer in the same ways that they desire a pet mechanic or handyman. They can let their superior mind come up with the ideas and they've got somebody to take their ideas and make them work. I've tried to oblige the demands of people who don't understand that I'm an old man, with a full time job, a full time farm, a family, and community obligations, as well as running an open source project. Last year the pressure nearly killed me. Literally. And if you push back on these people they go off in a huff about how the devs don't care about them. They're always threatening to leave because that is the only leverage they have. Eventually they do. The more you try to help, the more demands and threats that are put on you. And there's one of me and hundreds of them. This does not scale. At some point you have to turn your attention to something else, and this is when they make good on their threat to leave since they're no longer the center of attention. It's easy for them to do this because they actually have no "skin in the game". They aren't invested in the project in any significant way.
Anyway a year ago I quit. It was attitudes such as those presented in this thread which made me realise that open source has changed since I started creating open source projects nearly 40 years ago. It is no longer about communities working together.
Now the emphasis is on "free as in beer". If people have to work they don't want any part of it. They just want the software to magically create and debug itself.
There are *lots* of exceptions to these sweeping generalisations - so don't go picking at them for that reason, but it pretty much describes how the decision was made to fire myself from the project I created. In doing so this project has started to thrive and the open source process has started to really work. Coincidentally the same thing happened when I left the Friendica project to start working on new directions in decentralisation - e.g. what you're now looking at six years later.
It seems that my presence as a founder and somebody who tries to help "most of the time" actually prevents the open source process from working in some still unknown way. People get together and solve problems and work together when there's nobody left to blame. Since I was the person to blame, this prevented the projected from thriving. That's my theory anyway and it seems to hold true. Maybe I'm just a lousy boss, but there's not much I can do about that since I didn't even try to be a boss.
This community is still coming to grips with my departure in many ways. (I'm still in the background answering questions and fixing bugs that are really thorny; but I'm really not involved at all in the day to day running of the project). The best thing you can do to further your own agenda (whatever that is) is to stop being an outsider throwing rocks at the devs and become an actual part of the community and help the devs defend themselves against the rocks. This means rolling up your sleeves unfortunately. There are rocks coming from the corporate players (who infiltrate and try to cause conflict), there are rocks from other projects, and there are rocks coming from within the community when they don't get what they want. There's no shortage of rocks.
As far as devs doing what the community demands and not going off to do their own thing, good luck with that. Open source has never worked like that. There are occasionally 2-3 people who try to push a general project "agenda" (in their *free and volunteer* time) but the vast majority of developers submit hit and run patches to things that bother or interest them personally. If paychecks are involved, this dynamic changes. This lets a project manager have some leverage over developers. We've talked a lot over the last several years about creating a software co-op so that there are paychecks involved. If this idea appeals to you, step up to the plate and help make it happen.