Open source is a hacker thing. Hackers like open source because it avoids useless duplication of effort, which is toilsome and wasteful. Hackers don't like toil and unnecessary waste.
Forks are nothing but otherwise-unnecessary waste. They become necessary through asshattery like spying on users, but they are a last resort, because everything else about a fork is antithetical to most hackers: it's boring, wasteful, duplicated work, induced solely by an unreasonable upstream.
We try a lot of things before we fork, including naming and shaming.
The imperative to fork generally stems from fundamental philosophical disagreements between the current maintainer and the user base. Concern over privacy seems pretty fundamental to me.
Badgering the maintainer doesn't fix the fundamental philosophical disagreement.
Forks don't matter if they don't succeed—it only wastes the time of people volunteering to have it wasted. But when they do succeed, sometimes amazing things happen. The history of open source is rife with hugely consequential forks.
Open source is a hacker thing. Hackers like open source because it avoids useless duplication of effort, which is toilsome and wasteful. Hackers don't like toil and unnecessary waste.
Forks are nothing but otherwise-unnecessary waste. They become necessary through asshattery like spying on users, but they are a last resort, because everything else about a fork is antithetical to most hackers: it's boring, wasteful, duplicated work, induced solely by an unreasonable upstream.
We try a lot of things before we fork, including naming and shaming.