As far as I heard, all of the "hard-coded" accusations were disproven. Wrapping a statement inside an IF() block that is not executed unless the instance admin specifically requests it is not the same as hard-coding.

Nor is Lemmy.ml's holding of the veto power for community suggestions quite hard-coded, although tbh its being opt-out is a bit closer to such than opt-in.

Feel free to send a link to educate me. Every link I've previously read ended up being disproven. In return, please feel free to actually examine the sourcecode yourself - Rimu has previously sent links to the exact lines involved to make the process quicker.

PieFed is opinionated software though, in other ways, that much is fair. As too is Lemmy, which offers numerous rights to admins and a bit less to mods but far, far less to mere users - like no modmail or other ability to ask a mod what happened; and while an instance admin can defederate from an instance, individual users have no ability to do so (e.g. users from that instance can still send you DMs, and troll you in communities not on their home instance). Fortunately both are FLOSS and we can look at the entirety of their respective sourcecode packages whenever we like, even make a fork if we would rather, as PyLova has done.