Fedia is just another kbin instance, not really a fork. It is tracking the development branch a bit closer than kbin.social, but it's still the same repo
Lemmy stores who upvoted what but does not make it easily available to everyone like kbin does - you can set up a Lemmy instance to grab upvoted and read them from the DB if you are so inclined, or you could just look at kbin to see the same info
Looking in ImageRepository.php it doesn't appear that images have their extra data stripped. Also testing it on my dev instance showed that GPS data remained in the image. Should be an easy fix since all image uploads are processed through that repository.
Also:
@maxeddy