https://github.com/px-loops/loopd

I could do this in a weekend!

Yes and no. Technically yes because the issue seems only to affect pixelfed.social; however, that happens to be the largest instance iirc. And hash tags are not federated, so one of the main features for discovery that is accessed from the landing page is unusable or broken (has been for months).

Meanwhile, people are out there talking and reading about this cool federated alternative to instagram called pixelfed, perhaps spending a few minutes browsing the site for the largest instance which also happens to have the word pixelfed in the URL, but as soon as they try interacting with it, they bounce off because they clicked on a link hoping to get more nature photos, but got an error instead. 🤷‍♂️