True and this is fine. A fork (even a friendly one) is the embodiment of the lack of consensus. It can be a short lived fork because the author intends to reach a consensus by proposing a merge request and the fork is motivated by the need to fix a trivial bug. It can last for months if the fork is about something more fundamental in the structure of the code. And while I’m just refering to the codebase of the project, I really mean the software project as a whole, including discussions, releases, issues etc.
You summarized my goal quite well 
And I don’t see how one can create a horizontal community without working to solve this problem.