It’s frustrating and it makes me sad and disappointed to see the SDF so unresponsive to pretty much all issues (even those raised on the system itself, about the system).

That being said, I actually feel like it makes me do the opposite of waste time, because it’s virtually impossible for me to get sucked into an upsetting interaction here that has no broader consequence beyond making me feel bad.

That's a shame. Problems like this is why lemmy won't go very far imo. Expecting a random person on the internet to go through the signup process which involves applying for an account on some instances is wishful thinking, them understanding what federation is and how it works is very optimistic, but then braking the federation with no warning and no action plan for fixing it is just shooting yourself in the foot.