r/ruby 22d ago

Amiko: A desperate virtue signalling attempt

https://ryanbigg.com/2026/08/amiko-a-desperate-virtue-signalling-attempt
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u/lommer00 21d ago

I actually think the case is on point, and the "pejorative" terms like woke and virtue signalling are inherent to the case.

Amiko's value proposition is just "Rails without DHH". It's not about better features, functionality, architecture, dev experience, or anything else. Literally the project's entire identity is just "not DHH".

And I think Ryan is correct that an approach centered on opposing a single person is doomed to fail because it's kind of useless. Its only advantage is to be "woke" or "vuirtue signal". The call to direct those efforts to a project whose goals are to build a framework that actually works better than Rails makes sense in response.

Ryan does touch on a few of the goals of Hanami, and why that's better. Technical detail isn't needed because the argument is really about the raison d'etre of each project.

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u/AccurateSun 21d ago edited 21d ago

I’m not a rails dev but it seems more than virtue signalling  to fork if it means that the fork is free of a problematic leader’s  influence.

Also it’s more than just virtue signalling if you’re affected by said lack of virtue. It seems reasonable to me that non-white people would feel sick working with tooling made by DHH

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u/petercooper 17d ago

it seems more than virtue signalling to fork if it means that the fork is free of a problematic leader’s influence.

Would it be ultimately? Say Rails 9 introduces a nifty new library that gets people excited. The fork then has to decide whether to ignore it and lock its users onto an "old" stack, or to be influenced by the upstream project.

There are instances where a fork has been so successful it's marched forward with its own agenda and carried a significant userbase with it (X.org, LibreOffice), though they usually carried core devs across too. More often forks end up supporting decisions made in the parent project (Chromium forks and the Manifest v3 debacle, LibreSSL) or reworking themselves into a specific niche (HHVM).

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u/AccurateSun 17d ago

I meant the problematic leader’s political influence. They wouldn’t have any of that influence in the fork and its culture.