Yes, the about site needs a lot of work. The demo site is using the Lemmy frontend but Java Springboot backend. The whole intent of the first milestone release is to be a drop-in replacement for Lemmy. It's after that where we will differentiate with things like better moderation/admin support, etc... The federation service will be built in Golang. And yeah, we need to do a lot more work on outlining what work needs to be completed in the form of issues. Those 8 for sure are things that need to be done though.

Hi @synlogic@toot.io appreciate it, but we have no budget for paying contributors (we aren't even covering base costs let along paying ourselves). This is an open source project where we don't have any plans to monetize the platform itself (we might consider building things down the line that are paid add-ons, but nothing that would be essential for running your own instance self-hosted)

I replied on this in a Matrix room already. I won't retype my whole reply here. Essentially, IMO GPL stifles innovation as it forces everyone to use the same license and for everyone to release their code. This might be a good thing when it comes to concerns over competition (eg Threads vs everyone else), but it is a bad thing when it comes to building a community around a platform (theme developers can't sell custom themes because they also have to publicly release their code under GPL. Plugin developers have the same issue. Technically, 3rd party apps should be releasing their code as well). Yes, there are many people who enjoy contributing to open source (myself included). However, there are also many that want to be recognized (financially) for their work. GPL ignores the latter. The fediverse already has a mechanism to guard against some corporation coming in and taking the code from a platform and building a commercial product on top of it - defederation. We don't need GPL to "protect" us from anyone here).

NOTE: I also am not a lawyer. I might have some things wrong w/r/t GPL. However, I'm old enough to remember when it was actually an important OS license and when it was truly needed. I don't believe that is the case any more. LGPL might be fine, but the rest of the variants should only be used after extremely careful consideration and not just as a default.

Thanks everyone for the warm welcome.

Something else to consider here would be some kind of batching. A system doing this check should group users together by instance and make a single call to that instance. Something like: "Hey, I have this list of users from your instance. Are they all still active? A, B, C, D..." Reply: "From your request, here is the list of users that I found in my database: A, D". Now the calling system would know it should remove all data for users B & C.