It’s admittedly not a very difficult project, it was done pretty quick for an April Fools event in 2017. Honestly it could be a good coding challenge because the basics themselves are easy, it’s just how you build it at scale. So you just need someone to make a new Lemmy community, a new website, and have a lot of people get hyped about it so that it becomes the ‘one’ for Lemmy. Ludwig hired one dude to write a clone for his stream, so there just has to be someone who has the time, energy, and care to make one for this community.
Pretty common in tech layoffs altogether. Been through several waves over the years and typically the CEO goes “we don’t need this team, what do they do anyways?” before firing them and finding out exactly what that team did. I’ve always told coworkers to tell them hell no.