Fun fact: your name made the list, too:

        "^RockBottom",
        "^rockerface$",
        "^rockSlayer$",
        "^RockyDale([0-9]+)?$",
        "^RockyGlen([0-9]+)?$",

Unfortunately I don't see Tess-like community grouping feature in Alexandrite, and it doesn't even have a setting for the default comment sorting method.

I don't really like Tess' UI design that much - I'm comfy with Lemmy's default. It's advanced features that I'm gonna miss. Alexandrite seems to be just as bare-boned as Lemmy's UI.

But I found info on Lemmy 1.0 that will be released eventually and has most features that I want so I probably just gotta wait a little until that day comes.

Piefed is opinionated software because Rimu puts his biases and preferences in to the final product. But Piefed makes them optional and puts the toggles in the place you would expect them so that admins can opt in or out of those decisions in a considered way.

Several questionable features like "reputation" (basically karma) were added in PieFed on a opt-out basis creating lots of drama. Rimu (the main developer of the project) reacted poorly to this. Then he also got into another drama related to one of .world admins and got attention of the tankies. He ended up creating a built-in banlist of people who offended him, to his instance - except that it doubles as the flagship PieFed instance so it was widely seen as a bad move.

The most recent drama was related to the 'vote limit' based on a observation that a small percent of people on threadiverse cast most votes on posts. He (somehow) thought it meant these people control what everyone sees so he ended up adding a limit on how many posts and comments each user can vote. It doesn't affect most users but some very active users were really upset over it.

There are posts on c/fediverse@lemmy.world on all these events if you want to know more about them.