It's worth noting Lemmy was pretty rough back then and the reason it was forked was because a lot of features we really needed for a forum of this size didn't exist yet, it didn't have anything to do with federation (not saying you suggested that, I just thought that's a misunderstanding which could be read into your comment)

Yeah that's a great point. This history is pretty interesting but I don't know the details too well. I remember the devs made a number of features for our fork that were eventually upstreamed, but I can't remember which ones specifically.