Main thing I want is to override site css. Who cares what the browser itself looks like.

scrutinize the protocol beforehand.

Sorry but that buys into the data miners' self serving myths. It implies the protocol is ok unless some failure makes it leak more information than was intended. In fact it's invasive even if it works exactly as hoped. "Tracking" is a misnomer too. It's hostile surveillance even if it's at population level. (Any nonconsensual surveillance that produces info to be used by people you don't like is hostile by definition. And it's near guaranteed that some of the buyers-advertisers, political campaigns and funders, govt agencies, whatever-will be people you don't like). So shut it down.

Sort by newest first.

I'd like the feed to be adjusted so that if there are a bunch of posts from the same community not too far apart from each other chronologically, to group them all together. Alternatively, a way to block communities showing in your front page view without blocking them completely. It's not just memes, there are a bunch of other topics that also clutter up the front page constantly. Even things like news reports in Dutch, which are perfectly legit except I can't read them, would be less annoying with this type of feature.

Yeah, I couldn't name one either (I'm from the US). The first name that popped into my mind was Jimi Hendrix but he wasn't British. I guess Othello wasn't British either, and may not have even been historical. I had heard of Idris Elba but didn't realize that he was British. No idea about the Spice Girls.

There is a story (maybe apocryphal) that former US Vice President Dan Quayle (famous for malapropisms) once referred to Nelson Mandela as a "great African-American", fwiw.

If you can manage programmers, then yes. Everyone says that's just like herding cats.

Here's another example, not from here. Before celullar phones, before television, before broadcast radio and even before the telephone, there was the telegraph. Communications with it were done in Morse code, by operators tapping away on telegraph keys. Telegraph keys were typically made of brass, and people who used them all day were called "brass pounders". That profession is long since obsolete, but there are still ham radio enthusiasts who use Morse code as a hobby, and there is a group of them called the BPL, for "Brass Pounder's League". There are also people who simply try to honor the history of the venerable telegraph even though they recognize it as being a relic from the bygone era.

Anyway, where am I going. Someone started a pretty good site about telegraphy and telegraph keys, called "brasspounder.net" which was a really cool name. Unfortunately Google's algorithm seems to have classified that name as that of a porn site, because it saw the word you get if you ignore the "br" at the beginning, leaving "ass pounder". Whoops. The site ended up changing its name to telegraphy.net, which is fine but less evocative in my opinion. Oh well.

The above is an example of the so-called Scunthorpe problem. Let's see if Lemmy has that too.

How well do you think the federation model is working, in terms of cultural dynamics, more defederations than I would have expected to see, etc.? I'm not counting technical glitches that I assume will get sorted out over time.

Propeller beanies as formal and business attire.

Ny guess is they imagine it becoming like YouTube, where some popular tubers can monetize their channels and sometimes make a living. But that is also how Medium and Substack would, and both lose money and suck at the same time.

"Thus we join television in leading people to kill thoughtlessly.". --Emacs manual, in earlier days.

You weren't around for Usenet. It was great, then social media took over.