A lot of the problems with Lemmy boil down ultimately to overall lack of moderation.

Yeah, I would say we are definitely at a "work-in-progress" level, with a ways to go.

The recent thread in the Fediverse community praising the devs of many Fediverse platforms is a great example: it became highly toxic, ultimately being locked.

I saw the post originally. Going back it looks like FiniteBanjo went to pick a fight. I'm not trying make any judgement on their comments, just that they appear, to me, to wanted to start an argument ("Well, not all of them. Some of them are a stain on this earth."). Not surprised it was locked at that point.

... with the admins themselves literally flinging actual death threats against admins of other instances.

My recollection and understanding of that situation was that it was an inferred threat, that, when confronted, was immediately rescinded and that admin stepped down due to their actions. So, I think, it's a bit disingenuous to use that as a negative against them. To me, they responded appropriately when confronted with how their message was taken (clarification that's not how it was intended and then stepping down from their position of authority).

I believe soon after the .world admins faked "evidence" that the anarchist admins were really fascists trying to sow discord or something (I don't recall the exact allegation, but I remember the evidence being shown and confirmed to be fake). My recollection is Rimu backed the .world admins even after their evidence had been shown to be faked. I want to say that is when Rimu introduced the instance "silencing" feature, to reduce anarchist influence after his and the .world admins' attempts to expel the anarchists with the faked evidence failed.

So there will never be a solution to this step that involves all of us getting onto the same page.

Decentralization. There doesn't need to be, in my eyes.

I do decry the right of places such as Chapotraphouse to exist, but I do think that they need to be labeled properly, with a warning label ...

... the instance picker (the last time I checked) was very confusing and came nowhere close to explaining what individual users could expect when signing up to an instance.

... as people who jumped through all of the prior hurdles flee this toxic shithole ...

On-boarding is a huge gap in my mind. From my view, we basically throw everyone in the deep-end and hope they learn to swim and aren't too concerned with fixing the issue, because we all learned to swim, so why can't they.

I could see an on-boarding that quickly explains the structure (like 2 sentences about decentralization/email-analogy and identifying a users name and instance. Then go into a quick questionnaire (for determining best host instance for them) about what kind of posts they want to see (one of those could be a quoted .ml account, to see if the new user wants to see "triad" content). From there some, basic filtering/block list yes/nos (block-list for spam accounts: yes/no, agentic accounts: yes/no, bot accounts: yes/no, etc.) and interested topics (software, cats, art, etc.). I think that would go a long way in helping get an easier and more welcoming environment (may only be fully possible via Pylova features at the moment (block-lists)).

Unfortunately, PieFed seems to be continually actively working against this goal now, making the options more opaque rather than transparent - e.g. any PieFed community on an instance that does not explicitly disable the downvote feature (and which ones have done that? how is anyone supposed to know!?) is shadow-censoring contributions offered from many different software platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, etc.), without disclosure of that fact.

That's a good point I hadn't thought of before. I'm not sure how an instance could keep a user informed without keeping a larger database of community and instance settings. Alternatively, sending that info for each load or interaction the user makes. The larger database sounds much more reasonable, but still daunting and not easily implemented and probably with a significant compute cost.

... whose devs look to me to be tired on working to support new features, especially for PieFed.

This isn't surprising to me. Piefed has 20% of the users Lemmy has (and that increase to 20% is relatively recent) and developer generally want to get paid for their work (especially if they don't have a main corporate job).

PyLova might be the single best hope the entire Threadiverse has to grow. We’ll see what happens!

Yeah, definitely looks to be the brightest hope we have right now. Hopefully, they can keep up a sustainable pace and don't burn out.