It shocked me to realize how authoritarian Lemmy was, after moving over to it from Kbin.social as it died. And it has only gotten worse over time - e.g. it used to say which mod removed something, while now it just says “mod”, which is particularly disadvantageous when there is no modmail so you would have to DM them in some other space like Discord or Matrix or some such.

Tbf, Lemmy was mainly marketed to instance admins, and only after the fall of Reddit did people try to pin their hopes to make it a viable alternative for common, non-techie users who don’t use Arch Linux btw. Then, several alternatives did not pan out - Mbin seems stuck in its development after breaking away from Ernst, as too does Sublinks (the main dev had a baby), though PieFed is indeed coming along nicely, and giving me hope by providing democratization of moderation (by creating tools, such as keyword filtering, that allow for the end user to curate their own experience rather than have to rely upon a mod to do everything).

And Rust is a really difficult language, even for people who already know C++. And there wasn’t really much competition until PieFed, so whether intentional or not it may not matter, but basically if we want something then we need to first build it. As we are doing!:-)