This page aims to cover that (at least for using mTLS) https://webmeshproj.github.io/documentation/using-mtls/ - but you are right - administration docs in general need a lot more love.
EDIT: I've added a link to that page in the part of the insecure "Getting Started" that says "this is insecure don't do it this way". Hopefully that helps people in the right direction a bit more - but I have a long road of more documentation ahead of me.
As always - any and all contributions are welcome :)
Except it is encrypted, and pretty secure. That's not really related to the issue. Facebook complied with a subpoena as they are legally required to do so. Signal would have to do the same. The only difference there is that Signal doesn't retain decryption keys for your data so subpoenaing them would be pretty pointless except to prove that some conversation happened.
I think you are over conflating "reddit-isms" and "internet-isms". Reddit is where stuff like this has been most prominent for a while - but the whole funny naming thing has been around since the birth of the internet.
If you click your name in the top right you can go to your Profile which has a list of subscriptions as one of the tabs. Also under your settings you can make your home view be just your subscriptions instead of everything.
No way to set newest as default that I'm aware of yet - would be nice because I'm like you in that regard.
There are a lot of customizations out in the wild provided as CSS scripts to install with Stylus or JS scripts to install with a monkey plugin.
I'm using this plugin for collapsible comments everywhere right now. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/468923-kbin-improved-collapsible-comments
I could be wrong - but I'm not seeing anything that will help search engines index kbin.social effectively. There is a loose robots file, but I'm not seeing any indicator of site maps. Pretty much a necessity if you want to get crawled automatically.
I won't be surprised if the board ousts him over the PR mess he has created in the wake of this. But I highly doubt you can compare the two so closely. The board wants money and is presenting him with strategies. The dude is the CEO and is acting on those recommendations on his own accord. All the earmarks of a tech CEO who has finally drank too much of his own kool-aid. If anything I could see Ellen Pao being entirely his doing - and this is some weird cosmic force of karma coming back for revenge.
I mean...yea. You damn near broke the internet with this.
So I can't speak for moderation tools. The search question intrigues me because there is a search feature but I can't tell if it has any sort of filter support.
As for the image issues. I just came across stylus and https://github.com/aclist/kbin-css/ - the user experience is worlds better with it installed. And there are tweaks for a lot of the image issues and other quirks of the main theme.
That being said, the ability to install these styles should be streamlined into the server I think. External extensions come and go - which would leave anyone using them dead in the water.
I used to particularly enjoy getting banned from subs for being mean - with a link to my comment being a reply to someone calling me an idiot and me telling them why they are wrong.