That said, I do wish development was more active. I imagine there’s some hesitancy for users to literally buy in, but they really do need more funding for developers.

Mbin has been getting some traction lately, as a community-supported fork of Kbin (which was handled by a single person): https://github.com/MbinOrg

This seems promising. Lemmy can also be developed of course, but Rust seems a more niche language than PHP