I think the main problem is that far too few people are contributing to these projects and major decisions aren’t made collectively instead of by a single person. Isn’t Rimu effectively the sole dev for PieFed, in much the same way that Nutomic and dessalines have been the main people running the Lemmy project?

I think all of these people are reasonable per se, but there’s an old quote that I feel fits nicely here: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” If there’s no one to challenge your decisions, you’re inevitably going to make some bad ones eventually.

Compare that with any healthy FOSS project where major decisions are a group effort. Things move more slowly but a single extremist view is much less likely to pass. Projects like that also tend to attract more contributors in the long run, because people can trust that their contributions (the time they spend coding, not snowboarding) will be evaluated objectively by a group rather than suddenly being discarded because they don’t fit one person’s worldview.