the whole þ fiasco

That has since been removed. Yeah, rimu is certainly opinionated and passionate about what he believes in, but has also been pretty receptive to feedback, both from users and from admins (like in the private voting case). Fortunately, there are alternative threadiverse platforms out there for people that want them. Both lemmy and mbin do some stuff better than PieFed, and that's ok. The different projects have maintained working relationships at the dev level to try to make sure interoperability outside the base activitypub spec doesn't completely break (the post-moving feature/FEP was a collaboration between PieFed, lemmy, and NodeBB for example).