Worse than the modlog entries are the direct database manipulations that didn’t even show up in the modlog. The Lemmy devs said that it was due to a bug as the new version was coming out and… we all decided to take them at their word, bc what else can/should be done? It is notable then that at least there is transparency enough for entries to make it into the modlog - bc there are other ways.

I have some good news for you: I’ve seen lots of programmers saying that Python is considerably easier to learn and read code for than Rust is. As such, feature parity and “polish parity” might come sooner than later.

Absolutely! I’ve wondered if I should take the time to learn it myself even. I know C++ and Unix, but probably wouldn’t have all that much time to volunteer to the project regardless, though you are absolutely right that lowering that barrier should do wonders for such! And even just feature requests and pointing out issues that don’t work will help.

I thought similarly about Rust too, but long ago decided that I did not want to have any communication with people who act like that - I’ve been burned by that before, even learning several new languages (WikiMedia syntax + their odd “template” structure that is a whole other language + Cargo database querying that is yet again distinct, especially as it differs substantially from true SQL), but still walked away from everything bc of the toxicity of the people in charge, e.g. calling a single back-and-forth collaborative edit session an “edit war” and then locking the page. At the end of the day, Lemmy is “theirs” to do with as they please, and that is that. Short of making a fork, or an entirely separate implementation of the ActivityPub protocol, the situation isn’t really salvageable.

Also, any instance on the Fediverse needs some work to get it more fully integrated into the wider whole - e.g. apparently nobody on PieFed.social has been a member of this community here that we are talking in for the past couple of months. I have seen similar issues with !justpost@lemmy.world where posts existed on my instance but were all months old. All it takes is one person subscribing, and then about a day for the posts to catch up and sync, but apparently that had only been true in the past and then wasn’t any longer, perhaps after some update. Unless something goes wrong - e.g. I made a post from my StarTrek.website account, to a Star Trek community on Lemmy.world, and even two days later it still doesn’t know about all the comments and votes yet, though it is known that lately such activities wrt Lemmy.world are getting jammed - and it should be fixed in 0.19.6. So anyway it’s not like Lemmy works perfectly and PieFed does not - they both have their issues, many of which are solvable easily by those who know how. Even short of editing the codebase.

Admiral Patrick, who developed Tesseract and admins dubvee.org, has publicly stated wanting to replace the Lemmy backend on his instance with Sublinks, whenever that comes out. However, I haven’t even heard of any updates on the project for like half a year. In contrast, when I mentioned some small issues to the PieFed developers, some of those issues were fixed even before someone else told me that it was not currently that way - THAT is a FAST fix! - and some other issues were bumped up to higher in the priority queue. The are active, not only with PixelFed and Loops, but PieFed as well, and it is looking pretty spiffy already. It wouldn’t allow me to send messages yet - that’s fair I suppose, for a new account to avoid potential for spam - but I see that you have an account there too! If you can still access it, check it out!:-)

Re-reading through some old threads without HBs (my instance does not defederate from them either) or e.g. Cowbee from Lemmy.ml, it makes such a difference! Even the less contentious Lemmy.ml users still have a substantial amount of “snark” to them - no that’s not the right word bc I actually like that, but some form of toxicity I mean, like “hey, I’m just asking questions here!” (No, you’re really not!), which isn’t always obvious to spot immediately, but whenever I do it is virtually always either from someone on HB or Lemmy.ml (or Midwest.social but that’s rare enough to not want to block).

I do think a lot of people will end up migrating, either to PieFed or Sublinks. The USA political season is coming up in the next several weeks…