I sometimes check in Lemmy to see how it fares.
I ran into it when it was just starting up. It was almost not active at that point, really an alpha idea of what could become a reddit like system but federated. You can imagine that it was just a few people test posting.
A lot of work has been done by a whole bunch of people to actually getting this far over those years. Which is, however you see it very commendable.
I know right! Grandfather Lemmy! (and thank you!)
Was a theory i had as well, but copied whatever was there, and even afterwards ran
git submodule init && git submodule update
(from the docker install section), but all without luck.