I thought previously a subscribe-able block list would be a great addition, at the user and/or the instance level.

I love this idea. Topic Feeds are already user-customizable and shareable, so why not block lists? And while I haven’t read through it yet, see also supersquirrel’s recent post (last day or two) on the topic in the Fediverse community iirc, saying similarly for Mastodon. Admiral Patrick’s toxicity filter went behind people’s backs and did such opaquely, but when handled transparently and with full informed consent that would be an entirely different story. And then people could choose like no filter, minimal or maximal filtering, or perhaps some intermediary steps between those.

Some issues remain, like instance blocking does so without informing the recipient, who gets essentially shadow-blocked by the recipient. But that is not something fixable by PieFed alone, and would require cooperation with Lemmy to receive the signal and pass it on to the affected users in whatever way they chose.

I think we are uncomfortable and taking steps, unfortunately slowly, to move past that phase of development.

It’s been like 3 years. I for one have lost hope, especially now that we are well past the era of Reddit enshittification. We cannot rely on future Redditors to come over anymore, and therefore where else are users likey to arrive - Instagram? Tiktok? Anyway, if anything happens, then I will believe it when I see it, but the likelihood of something happening to change things in a major way seems to me to be decreasing with each year that ticks on by. The time to do something, if we wanted to entice more Redditors, is now long past.

There’s no way (to my knowledge) to switch instances to an alternative software (Piefed, Pylova, Mbin)

No actually there is - Rimu converted many Lemm.ee communities over to PieFed.social (I forget if they lost access to modify their older content, or perhaps if they messaged him before lemm.ee went fully down from their old account then he could take that as proof of ownership and grant such access), and Quokka has converted fully from Lemmy to PieFed and then from PieFed to PyLova, so aside from Rimu are the preeminent experts in such conversions. With Rimu’s community migration tools and Quokka’s experience, communities on Lemmy are not held hostage, anymore.

Otoh, Rimu himself is personally quite opinionated on certain matters, and rarely but decidedly goes against community push-back to enact his own agendas. In the second most recent event, prior to the PyLova code non-attribution one I mean, he decided fairly unilaterally to shadow-censor content even hosted on other instance platforms - restricting people’s ability to vote more than a given allotment per day, even if they use Lemmy, Mbin, Mastodon, nodeBB, etc. Which is arguably fine, except vaguely like the Admiral Patrick situation, Rimu continues to do so without telling the recipients that they are being thus censored. Like someone presses an upvote button, the color changes, but then the vote count does not change. MANY people disagreed - about the change overall, about its lack of transparency, and also in how it was effectively not communicated to the instance admins, leaving them surprised at the behavior of the code running on their own machines. Rimu lost a lot of trust in his handling of that situation.

So people are - correctly - hesitant now to put their trust into PieFed, when at any moment some similar situation could arise. Of course there is the PyLova fork, but it is extremely new, so I would wager that people are taking stock of it and seeing how it will shake out. Lemmy has a tainted reputation among the general public (for good reason), PieFed people barely know about but since it shadow-censors people’s contributions like Reddit does I can no longer see it becoming popular among the diminishing crowd that wants to flee Reddit’s overzealous censorship practices, all the more so since most 3rd-party apps only nominally support PieFed much less PyLova. The situation is not entirely untenable but it’s inordinately complex, and in those Reddit threads I shared earlier you can see people simply noping out of everything that we have going on here with all our in-fighting. The technology has to get better if we want to bring people here. Which I suppose it is, but at a pace that is exceedingly frustrating. Until it does, we remain a troll bar.