Mastodon splits the difference, giving individual accounts a number of tools to mute or block content or accounts, but also providing instance-wide tools to admins and moderators. Lemmy and Kbin are several years newer than Mastodon, so I assume that they’ll eventually catch up in terms of moderation tools.

I’ll add, one thing that the admins of lemmy.ml and lemmy.world should think about ahead of June 30th is whether its healthy — for the network, their instances, and/or their mod teams — for two instances to host the majority of accounts on the service. Personally, I suspect that a broader distribution is probably better for everyone, and if they agree on that point, then one thing they work out in the meantime is a plan for how to limit new sign-ups and the best way to direct them out to other instances.

That data migration item might be a little cost prohibitive starting June 30th.

As for feature enhancement, I agree that Lemmy should be forward-looking in terms of what it needs in order to enhance the service, but I don’t know that catering to expectations set by Reddit is necessarily the best path. Reddit evolved to suit the needs of a centralized, profit-seeking service. Not all of the decisions they made along the way were necessarily optimal for users, conducive to strong communities, or even particular good for society as a whole, no matter how much the Reddit userbase has grown to tolerate or even demand them. And, ultimately, I don’t think it’s healthy for Lemmy to stake its future on its potential as a Reddit replacement. At some point, it needs to chart its own course. The devs should certainly learn from Reddit where they can, but Lemmy can be more than just where Redditors go when they’re pissed off at the admins.

If the fallout from Twitter’s API decision is anything to go by, some of the developers who used to maintain apps for Reddit will likely pivot to making Fediverse apps instead. That’s what Tapbots after API changes pushed them off of Twitter. It wouldn’t surprise me if Apollo were to relaunch as a Lemmy/Kbin app three months from now.

Good question. My memory is pretty fuzzy, but I think I first heard about Mastodon from @neauoire@merveilles.town, who I followed on Twitter after stumbling across their Beldam label on Bandcamp. I don’t remember if I was already frustrated with the direction Twitter was taking, or just curious about the new technology, but I set up an account on mastodon.xyz, quickly graduated to running my own server, then decided that was more commitment than I was willing to put in, and relocated to Merveilles.town.