I've had a Lemmy instance for a niche hobby built and waiting to go live for months now, but I'm not going to subject myself to the headaches of fully manual moderation.
There are a few unofficial repos for Lemmy automod functionality, but last time I checked, they all appeared to be early alpha stage.
It seems like a glaring oversight by the core contributors, and I don't understand how it's not a top priority.
For something on the free end, simple machine forums works on most shared hosts (and in terms of selfhost, it's just a PHP + MySQL stack) and should work for most communities. It doesn't require a lot of technical skill to configure/use, which can make it appealing if you don't want to micromanage mods - they'll be able to figure out the interface themselves.
Discourse is popular in tech communities, but I've always found the software to be rather unwieldy and inefficient. It's a ruby dinosaur with all the limitations and advantages that implies. It's also an application that basically demands the "ownership" of an entire server - the devs are explicitly against running other things on the same server that runs Discourse, which is a dealbreaker if you don't have a good budget.
I'm curious about any comparisons you did, or if there were technical concerns with Lemmy or Matrix.
(I hope this question comes across as genuinely curious, I don't mean to snark at your project! I just like reading about decisions to choose one thing vs another)
I'm just more familiar with the Matrix protocol, having built several projects on it. Activitypub is pretty cool though and I'm working on AP support, so Shpong should be able to interface with Lemmy in the near future!