I know you said it is a brain dump, but your follow up still seems mostly an emotional reaction to how the devs responded rather than a reasoning synthesis process.

E.g, your "Where Fediverse Software Differs", it seems like you want to pay off the set up you've placed in the previous paragraph (about the difficulty of being an open source developer), but this payoff never comes and instead you end up the argument with "The feature requests valid, and the devs responded like dicks".

Even if we take "the feature request was valid" for granted, it does not follow that the devs must act on it right away. If the Lemmy devs acknowledged the issue and said "You are absolutely right and we strongly advise anyone hosting an instance in the EU if they are worried about GDPR", then what? Do you think that whoever wrote the "perfectly valid feature request" should still be pushing for making it a higher priority? On what grounds?

Also:

The operators, who to some degree help the project gain visibility, support, and money, are themselves doing unpaid labor: community building, moderation (...)

shouldn't ever be used as an excuse to justify free labor from developers. This is not Self-Loathing and Display of Low Self-Steem Olympics. Anyone that comes to me with a "I'm not gaining anything from my work" argument will promptly receive "The fact that you can not establish boundaries and are martyring yourself is not my problem" as a response.

The fact that developers of FOSS software project are able to tell users "If you want something done, you need to give us the resources or do it yourself" should be lauded, not criticized or be seen as "dicks".

If instance owners are dealing with bad users "and not getting paid for it", they can do two things: close down the instance, or put proper boundaries and tell what they are willing and not willing to do for free. Alternatively, they can do what I do and make the relationship explicitly transactional: I'm more than willing to work a lot to solve my customer's problems, but this is only after they actually paid me for it. The fact that I only accept paying customers makes my instance noticeably easier to manage. Even if I'm charging way less than what some people would donate to their favorite instance, the fact that all the users from the instances are paying make for an excellent filter.

The common denominator is relatively simple to understand: good optics of a project leads to more users, leads to more communities, leads to people building all kinds of apps and tools for those communities, leads to more people being willing to donate to a project.

This "donation-based" approach needs to change. Mastodon has no problems with "optics", and its "Founder and CEO" is reportedly making 30000€ as yearly salary. This is ridiculously low. This is less than what an intern makes at Facebook. The three Lemmy devs are sharing less than 4k€/month. You can make more money by working part-time on Uber Eats. To think that this is enough to claim "they are making some money" is frankly absurd.

If society in general is so tired of exploitative Big Tech, society needs to give a strong signal that it's willing to pay for the alternative. If we don't want to have the most brilliant minds of our generation working on how to optimize the amount of ads that you get to see online, then we need to show that those building better solutions can be properly rewarded. It's not up to the developers to try to build out everything perfectly and then go around begging for people for breadcrumbs and their seal of approval.

To sum up: I'm not saying that developers need to be worshipped because they can do what others can't. I'm also not saying that the Lemmy devs were right in how they communicate with its users, but I am saying that they are absolutely right in establishing their priorities and not let their work be dictated by someone that is not putting any Skin on The Game.