Wallabag might be what you’re after.

I really hope that is the case, I wouldn’t be on board with swapping my open source reddit app for a proprietary fediverse one.

I agree, it should be transparent and decided on by the instance but think even a few beginner oriented defaults would be helpful. I think the onboarding and default lemmy experience is quite poor and anything to reduce friction for new users should be encouraged if it can be done transparently.