The only thing I'd add is that federation making it into lemmy's code base did not mean the feature was complete or usable at all. Plus nobody would've wanted to federate with us back then anyhow, since we would've immediately dominated the conversation on any instance, since there were no other large instances around, which was basically the case until this year

Also lots of drama and harassment and people burning out

Edit: oh and actually, it's worth noting, the development effort for re-merging with lemmy wasn't just "migrate our data back to compatibility with lemmy", it was "re-develop from scratch all our custom features and contribute them back to upstream lemmy (if they will take them)"

Hexbear devs (primarily @makotech222) are the reason that Lemmy has Custom Emoji, Taglines, Pinned/Featured posts, and probably a good handful of smaller things I'm forgetting.