I will no longer be able to assist with development nor debugging actual issues with the software... Quite juvenile behavior from the devs. It stemmed from this issue where the devs continuously argued in public by opening and closing an issue. Anyway, thought I would keep y'all apprised of the situation, since these are the people maintaining the software you are currently using.
Nah the old official reddit code is entirely out of date, writing up something like the original official reddit clone, is not too hard, and I would rather rewrite it (in Rust obviously ^^).
Hubzilla is certainly an interesting and ambitious project (though a PHP codebase repels me a little bit, TBH). Need to check it out further. Zot also sounds interesting. Looks a little bit like a swiss-army-knife sandbox-toolkit of federated social networks.
I wanted to run an instance myself but find the info and user-base lacking. Like I really want to like Hubzilla.
You are right, it is very ambitious and it is a bit sad to not see it gather more traction.