I wasn't gonna say anything but

Without technical brains to work on the codebase, a fork means nothing, because code is how you fork a project.

Social aspects are vital yes, and many forks die because the social PR and capital aren't there

But you need code too, and without that, forkoff has no prayer to succeed

Yes, project structure is necessary, and yes, Mastodon should really be under the auspices of a foundation for copyright purposes if nothing else

But you can do technical stuff whilst you are doing organisational stuff

You don't have to wait for the paperwork to have a working project structure, and once the paperwork's in, you just assign relevant copyrights to the foundation (with contributor permission, but that's what a CLA is for) and continue operating as normal

What do I know? I've only done this before.