love, sevvie

Most of us make use of distributed and federated software every day, the code for which is freely available. For most of these projects, one person figureheads and makes decisions for the planning and execution of the project, whereas everyone else contributes to the amount they are able within the scope and skillset with which they are best able to contribute. Their leadership has no impact on your freedom; you are still free to use, modify, fork, and even not use the software should you find yourself disagreeing with this figurehead. You can call that figurehead a ruler, a bastard dictator for life, but the only space over which he holds diktat is the development and advancement of his own software project. If Alex Gleason came to your house, held a gun to your head and said, “Use my fork of Pleroma!” then I think you might have an argument that rulers and leaders are functionally the same thing. But he doesn't. He's just vegan, by the way.