I can't help but feel like this is thinking way too far ahead. It feels to me that society has to get people into riding bicycles as an option before even thinking about refining the processes around building bicycles. A big factor of lifecycle (heh) assessment is the amount of usage you get out of a given produced object before it becomes necessary to replace. Making the option to ride the bike easier, more accessible, more inviting is how you make bicycles more sustainable.
re: carbon fiber cargo bike emissions
Clearly there needs to be more studies because this feels like very narrow view of cargo bikes especially when the market for consumer cargo bikes is largely occupied by Urban Arrow (aluminum), Riese & Muller (aluminum), Larry vs Harry (Aluminum), and many more that construct cargo bikes out of aluminum or steel. Just looking at some commercial models of cargo bike it seems like for the most part those are made from aluminum as well. I believe that Urban Arrow offers models for businesses.
edit:formatting
I think everything laid out here is perfectly reasonable. Lemmy hasn't made it easy and easy doesnt seem to be on the horizon for that development team.
My personal thoughts is that I don't think that the currrent implementation of lemmy is going to reach a point where the capabilities of the platform is going to meet the requirements of the beehaw project. Definitely not in the near term, and low probability in the scale of years.
If the worse comes about ill probably follow along to where ever beehaw ends up and ill just set up an lemmy acc elsewhere.
I don't envy the situation
// the commenter gives yet another unsolicited solution
I think it would be interesting if yall and other like minded instance admins were to start a federation pact/ code of conduct which would layout the requirements for federation. In my opinion, fostering the kind of online community that beehaw strives to be (as I see it anyways), requires acting outside of the capabilities of the lemmy the platform. Granted, this would require a critical mass of instances willing to sign to such a pact but this may ease the workload from a moderation point of view.