Sure you can use the existing test instances:
If people want to help they can contribute to lemmy directly, or write moderation tools in other languages. It won't help anyone to spend 8+ man years of development only to reach feature parity.
I am not dessalines.
Can you say when or where I glorified Stalin? Don't think I ever did that.
I think this is a great idea. I would be happy to help with this by answering questions or other things that need to be done.
Community creation has been enabled for a while on lemmy.ml, so you can just create it yourself.
Checkout my crate activitypub-federation, I think it has decent documentation. You can also see how it is used in Lemmy, or open an issue if things are unclear.
Warrant canary. I doubt those really work because law enforcement could easily require you to keep updating it.
We have lots of unit tests, and also a test suite which launches a couple of local lemmy instances and ensures that they federate as expected. But it's not possible to cover every single functionality, at least not with our limited resources. The problems all happened with things that are difficult to test and had major breaking changes in this release. In the future we won't need such breaking changes so there will be less problems.
Also keep in mind that Lemmy is provided for free and as is. We have no legal obligation to users. And you can always stay with an older version if you want more stability.
Im from Germany, living in Spain.
Of course contributions by volunteers are also welcome. However there are very few of those who are consistently contributing (particularly phiresky and sleepless one mentioned in op). And because they have a fulltime job their contributions are much smaller than mine or dessalines'. After the Reddit migration lots of people opened pull requests to implement new features, but most of them were abandoned after noticing how much work it takes to address review comments and actually get the pr merged. So fulltime devs seem very much preferable because they can put their full attention to Lemmy, and get a lot more done.
We want to change the API paths to make them more consistent, and have separate endpoints for image uploads (eg POST /api/v3/account/avatar). Not much else really.
Im working on this under the name of Ibis. Hopefully I can announce the first release within a few weeks.