I think the features I’m missing are easily adding more engines (haven’t looked much into it), and automatically blacklisting domains from coming up in searches.
Decided to go with a smaller instance from the start, as I think we can all see what happens when one entity holds too much power within an ecosystem.
Also wanted to go with one that was not defederated from other instances (nor defederating others as well). Checked a bunch of lists, and decided to go with my current one.
Doubt nobody will ask his opinions about Reddit though.
Don't get me wrong, he's a great guest, but he's a bit too big for Lemmy right now. He has probably a very busy schedule, and can't take a couple hours off just to chat with a dozen people.
A single tweet from him will take far less time and get 100x more views.
The code is open source, so you can inspect it yourself.
I doubt there's much incentive for Devs to implement features that would make Lemmy more facebook-like. There's no profit motive for it, and there are lots of other features and bug fixes that deserve their attention.
Maybe to a lesser extent, since not every instance federates everything. If clusters start to form, you'd expect some in-jokes to be limited to certain communities / instances.