Oh man, I feel like eviltoast.org is on the expensive side of things now. There’s less than 20 mau, but I pay close to $400/mo. Not including object storage or hardware running at home.
Realistically this is hosted on hardware I was already renting for other reasons, so actual cost is zero for lemmy itself. I could probably migrate to a small vm for $20/mo and only lose redundancy.
I could be totally wrong but my take on it is that they’re just wanting the community to handle it so they can work on other parts of lemmy. They at least don’t seem like they’re against better mod tools.
day-to-day mod and admin actions on this instance are pretty low. Bigger instances like LW probably would have more reason to complain :D
IMO I don’t think it is something the lemmy devs are focused on, but there is a growing community creating helpful tools around moderation/federation/maintenance. There were some core features added like mods being able to see downvotes to detect mass downvoting, and open issues for things like an invite system.
LemmyAutomod is an example of a community effort. I saw some other similar bots posted too.
It’s infra that was already hosting other things. Lemmy got added to it because there were spare resources in the cluster.