When I started using lemmy I just grabbed every app for it and tried them all. Boost is the closest I was able to find, and it has a ton of options to get it looking and feeling like RIF. The others were good, but just different. I liked RIF because of how simplistic it was, boost thankfully gives that same simplistic feel.
I believe so, it's where a lot of us went at first, but then realized if the guy running it doesn't like you, he just will ban you. Which is fine, it's his site, but that's not what I or many others wanted.