Lemmy devs were quite receptive and helpful to the hexbear developers that contributed.

For what it is worth as a multi-year instance with over 500 users for the majority of that time we were able to handle moderating and administrating the instance with the tools available and with support from the developers.

Hexbear faced everything the new instances had before there were any lemmy back-channels to help communicate, coordinate, or develop tooling.

Managing a lemmy instance takes a lot of effort and help and if many lemmy admins weren’t afraid of hexbear and actually asked for specific help in how to run a community I’m sure hexbear admins could help. (Those that haven’t blocked me, at least)

I find it ironic that lemmy.world would not have grown as much as it had if the lemmy devs hadn’t helped it by promoting it as “the generic instance” similar aid was given to beehaw, yet the known liar Rookie is here and in similar posts popping off. The same Rookie that wrote a lemmy bot that scraped every comment/post on .world and reposted it into Discord.

Gabe said it himself, when you have sufficient and active moderators a lemmy community essentially runs itself. I have organized almost 10 local moderator drives, vetted and educated interested users and provided frequent check-ins while removing moderators no longer interested/active I can agree with what Gabe said regarding community moderation.

For a site-level I can agree that not having a site-mod is annoying however it is a matter of organization to set up a pipeline for trusted multi-community moderators to become admins thus giving you the opportunity to recruit from a diverse set of time-zones so that you can deal with wreckers.

If an instance admin doesn’t want that level of responsibility, allow-list federation exists and works quite well.

To say there are features missing is true, however as someone that has been a lemmy admin for almost 4 years it is my perspective that it is possible to create a flourishing lemmy instance with the available tooling, that support does exist, and that developer contributions are valued. Multiple features developed on the Hexbear fork were integrated into upstream lemmy.

Thank you @nutomic@lemmy.ml @dessalines@lemmy.ml @CannotSleep42069@hexbear.net