Really I'm of the view that a hard fork of mastodon is (probably) not the right solution, but it's likely my view on that is for different reasons than a lot of other people who have talked about it (and also substantially similar in some respects, but with some core differences).
But if you want to do the work and it energizes you then go forth. It just seems to be more hassle than I suspect it will be worth versus just building a ground-up implementation (which is already plenty of work).
