Yup. Been following Dan for a while and this has only gotten worse. Problem is, his attitude absolutely informs the way he manages and handles his projects. Even one glance at the issues page for Pixelfed shows that.
I think at some point, a lot of the Fedi will realise that toxicity and hopefully we’ll see fork efforts like Pixelfed-glitch get more support. Because Pixelfed and Loops are good ideas, executed by someone who really doesn’t have the ability to properly execute on them. I don’t anticipate that these current user numbers will stay given the current, quite broken, state of Pixelfed.
It’s hard to say, but I’m not anticipating anything myself. Dude seems to be more interested in making flashy branded announcements than developing the thing to a working state.
What I will say is, he’s has for the last several years just under 400 Patreon backers (one of which was me), which was intended to give him funding to bring Pixelfed to a state of relative completion.
In that time he effectively abandoned Pixelfed to work on Loops (which is also in a really rough state and I anticipate will be similarly abandoned for Sup once he runs out of things to ‘announce’ for it), and now that Pixelfed has suddenly gotten this wave of attention, he’s talking about launching a Kickstarter to actually do the thing this time.
He has also been privately very hostile to groups such as the devs of Pixelfed-glitch, which were formed to continue development of Pixelfed, all while publicly stating that he is embracing it with open arms and sharing the development with that team.
He also responds to criticisms of these behaviours with posts like the ones I’ve attached here.
Source: Have been a Pixelfed instance admin for about five years, know several of the pf-glitch devs (who are all mostly server admins), and have been fairly active in the GitHub issues.