I haven't seen that community before. Some people have way too much time on their hands to keep posting about things they dislike. But at least it proves that censorship on Lemmy is impossible, when not even us developers can do it.
I posted about this in the admin chat on matrix, but you're right the pull request was merged very quickly.
The lemmyverse link is also a good idea, but users only see it after filling in their email and password. At that point it's unlikely that they would cancel it and go to a different website.
Edit: I'm now thinking to change the joinlemmy code so that any instance with more than x% of active users will automatically be hidden.
Interesting, I never used digg and didn't know about it's history. It seems like they could have easily fought back bots with captchas, email verification, phone verification and so on.
I believe there is still an open issue on Github for this, but no one was interested to help implement and test it. So use the search function and contribute!
Interop with microblogging is not the main purpose of Lemmy. The main purpose is to have a federated Reddit, with federation between Lemmy instances. That it can also connect with other platforms like Mastodon is more like a neat side effect.
We created Lemmy from the very start with federation in mind. But it was always meant to be a Reddit alternative, which means community focused. I don't see any reason to add user following when that's already supported by a dozen other Fediverse platforms, and would only dilute our main focus. I believe in the Unix philosophy: do one thing and do it well.
Activitypub is based on Activitystreams, and doesn't define any types of its own. Lemmy is fully compliant with the Activitypub standard as far as I know.
Not sure what more you want to read, but Dessalines and me do AMAs once in a while where we answer all sorts of questions. You can find them in !announcements@lemmy.ml.
And I don't work on Jerboa, you have to open an issue for this if there isn't already.
That's only one developer, but you were talking in plural. What other Lemmy dev are you referring to?