This ignores how money donated supposedly to support development of the Lemmy codebase goes instead towards moderation of their personal instance. Unless you want to donate to Nutomic specifically (which has other issues), there is no way to donate specifically to develop Lemmy code.
So ironically the answer to your question lies in the lines that are lacking, but that would have been there otherwise.
Bottom line is that it’s their code and they can do as they please. Meanwhile, I switched to PieFed. I wish you good luck with that extremely slow-paced development of Lemmy, but I am not putting any hope into it myself anymore.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 6 days ago
The main dev is also an admin on lemmy.ml. There would probably be more instances that defederate lemmy.ml if it weren’t for that, and the way that account-level blocking is implemented isn’t really that great.