Heh, ph0rkers and their shitcoins, nothing new.
If you're going to play that semantics argument, then Bitcoin doesn't currently exist and you're already using an altcoin since Bitcoin has been hard forked multiple times before.
There have only ever been two hard forks of the blockchain in the history of Bitcoin, and both nearly killed Bitcoin.
The first was overseen by
Satoshi in an attempt to fix the worst Bitcoin bug seen to date, and an unforeseen fork in which BerkeleyDB was replaced with LevelDB to allow for blocks greater than 512kb to be accepted by the network. The latter fork however didn't disenfranchise older clients by forcing them to use LevelDB over BerkeleyDB a one line workaround resolves the bug in clients still running with BerkeleyDB.
Now the scaling ph0rk fuss will create a blockchain incompatible with any previous version of Bitcoin. Nodes who do not wish to upgrade will reject the larger or segwit or whatevs blocks, while continuing to accept blocks on their own chain. Many don't seem to yet understand the implications of a Bitcoin hard fork this late in the protocol's maturity.
Typical VC mainstreameries trying to highjack the Holy Ledger to cope with their parasitic business models and their sociopathic cash burning rate.