Some of us currently (or have) and will continue to contribute upstream, but there is also nothing fundamentally wrong or unhelpful by making a fork. At it's core the Lemmy ecosystem is about federating and having instances talking to each other- And all of this can be done in any particular language or feature set so long as the apub spec is maintained and the data sets remain compatible in some form. Personally I think it's healthy for the project to have choices as someone still needs to setup, configure and run a lemmy- some might like the lighter footprint the rust version provides, and some might like the easier setup (or ease of slight personal tweaks) a typescript might provide.

yes and no, Dess just merged the PR we've be putting together to add our reporting api to upstream. going forward we will be writing in Typescript but that by no means means we can't still contribute the feature ideas. as we solidify those feature and technical improvements they can be written in rust and up-streamed should the devs desire those feature or improvements

there's still a few things im working on. im hoping to take the comment linking improvements upstream when i get it in a spot im happy with ^_