You right on most things. But I still have some question.

Lemmy is written in Rust, Mbin in PHP, and Piefed in Python.

Do you think there is a “best” most efficient programming language for building the program?

Mbin adopted Reddit’s karma system, Lemmy didn’t. Sure you could combine both of those and give the user the choice, but this reflects a difference in design philosophies. Lemmy users don’t just lack a karma system, they outright don’t want one. It’s a system which promotes karma farming, so it’s associated with the worst of Reddit. But ironically, it also encourages contributing, which is probably why kbin (Mbin’s predecessor) originally added it. The fediverse is in need of contributors over lurkers, so whether a karma system is bad or good for it depends on your perspective. And that perspective differs between the developers of these two projects.

What I was thinking is to implement the karma system but leave the option of enabling it to servers and users.

they outright don’t want one

If I’m talking sense, based on my previous opinions, I think adding a “plugin” to lemmy is a better option than building something entire new.

Finally, there’s also the danger of a company acquiring the project and enshittifying it. They can’t really acquire an entire federation protocol and every software implementing it.

I don’t think it would be a problem if the project is open source?