Thanks, good to know.

It could be backported, but there are now significant changes between the 0.19 and development branches, so it would take some work.

Fair enough, its just a bit strange that this particular critique comes up regularly.

Keyword filtering is about to be merged into Lemmy. Other features will also be added over time.

We are working on new moderation features all the time, for example 1.0 will correctly federate instance bans which is quite complicated to get right. There will also be a plugin system which allows for much more flexible mod tools. Its just that our time is very limited for all the work that needs to be done on a project with over 50k active users.

These performance results are only from the browser side, but dont cover server performance. The database for lemmy.ml is 60 GB, and that is with 6 years of history. Not sure where your 10x claim comes from. The lemmy.ml server costs 70 Euros per month and doesnt have much loa, with almost 10 times as many active users.

Are you referring to join-lemmy.org? It has a randomized order for the instances, so usually smaller ones are near the top.