I'd just add that the fork began before the site launched, in that month-long exile period on Discord. Recruiting for the project started on day one, and the deadline got pushed further and further back as we realized the scope of the undertaking. At that point, we had about a dozen volunteers from the community hacking on all sorts of random shit.

We added a comment / post reporting system, added a "site mod" permission (at the time, there were only community mods and site admins, and the site admin page exposed very sensitive operational details), tried to limit the number of embeds which could be included in a single comment (then left it at zero forever due to abuse), added a toggle to shut off community creation, added hCaptcha support, among many other changes. Some of these changes landed upstream early on, but even cherry-picking them was a chore. After the site launched, pronoun tags were added, and we ended up completely porting the UI to React.js for some fucking reason lmao.