I'm working on one of the remaining missing features in upstream lemmy right now, which is Taglines. backend PR is already up on Lemmy git, frontend PR incoming sometime soon. Afterwards, looking to start working on Featured Posts.
https://hexbear.net/post/159221
There was a transparency post as well about our progress since then, but it seems to be hidden. I'll reach out to the devs to see if they can get it visible again. There has been no progress since our last transparency post.
Hexbear has, for this very reason, inadvertently vindicated my outright refusal to use Minecraft mods and only play vanilla.
In the same way that thexbear deviated from the official release of lemmy, minecraft mods will deviate you from the official release cycle of minecraft, and if you deviate too far (or one of your mods stops getting active development) then you get stuck in an old version with no way to upgrade due to dependence on custom/legacy code.
I think the plan now (per the transparency post) is to drop merge plans per se, implement the features in Hexbear that Lemmy is still missing, and migrate Hexbear's data to mainline Lemmy once it's possible.
lemmy is missing a lot of stuff we take for granted on this site. tried to use lemmygrad for a bit and then gave up.