I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Fairly said.
FWIW, I’m a mostly retired coder with enough on my plate with my own projects and a fair degree of burnout, but I can read code. At a guess (unresearched) Piefed would be an easier codebase (and Python a more accessible language) to fork, but I’d probably look toward optional modules that could be added to standard Piefed at the discretion of an instance. Forking is a lot of duplicated maintenance.
At a guess (rule of thumb for developer estimates is double the number and increase the units. You could do it in 2 days means 4 weeks, it’s easy to envisage something but the implementation details multiply) the community moderation code would likely be on the order of a couple thousand lines. Given good design docs (hard) a team of three might take a month to get to a stable minimum viable implementation and it could probably be maintained solo thereafter. Highly achievable.
Getting a solid but flexible (to enable experimentation) architecture in place is key and starts with a well formulated, constrained (core features only but with examples of how it is likely to expand) explanation of the goals. Then a mockup of expected behaviour. I’d be happy to offer constructive criticism.