Exactly; would have been much cleaner. The recent update to v2 already required migrating one's config. So doing it again (now knowing the process) to such new "fork-fork" would've been a no-brainer.

But the whole situation has a more critical aspect than this technical issue: the new dev's appearance out of nowhere, lack of reasonable communication, and arrogance.

There's a rough guide here: lemmy.zip/comment/23205163

Perhaps sufficient to get started...