Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I consider my musical tastes to be broad and Pink Floyd remains one of my favourite bands of all time.

“Unified branding” kinda misses the entire mark of “federated but decentralized” that this network of services is supposed to be all about.

I don't think it does. Decentralized doesn't mean every instance must appear unique from one another, though they certainly can if that is their wish. There's no reason why a group of common instances shouldn't want to provide a unified approach to branding their platform.

You’ve mocked up a really clean looking theme, but I’d never use it personally because it’s light-mode and it would burn the eyeballs out of my head at night.

Thanks, the theme is just my usual rediggit for lemmy (the dark variant is coming soon). The point of the post was just to highlight the navbar logo concept.

Many instances will absolutely want to do their own branding across the board, and that's totally fine, but I also believe that many would like to see a unified approach to the platform. The beauty of the decentralization is that site admins are free to run their instance however they like.

No such feature exists yet on the desktop version, but I am sure it's on the wishlist already. Apps might be able to implement this themselves, but I can't say whether any have yet.

Edit: clarified

It's almost certainly technical issues relating to scalability. The user I mentioned above has created a community for tracking several performance issues that are likely impacting the platform now that user and post counts have increased exponentially.

No worries, and I completely sympathize with the situation. My hat is off to you site admins, and the lemmy devs, for keeping things afloat these past couple of weeks, often at great expense of both time and money. I am confident that all of these kinks will be ironed out in the coming months, and in the meantime, I am happy to have a few alts to hold me over.

It isn't just Lemmy.world, and isn't limited to v0.17 either. Lemmy.ca, which has been running v0.18 for days, is also not seeing a lot of federated content, nor accurate community subscription counts from other instances, including lemmy.ml and others running v0.18. I'm posting this from my .world alt because .ca is showing zero comments in this thread.

There have been several not-so-friendly comments made about the issues by someone in !lemmy_administration@lemmy.ml, calling out the site admins of .world and .ml for not sharing their server logs, and the overall silence on the issue. The user's concerns are genuine, but I don't agree with their behaviour.

I suspect the devs were/are completely overwhelmed by the mass influx of redditors these past two weeks. I assume someone is looking into it, but frankly I wouldn't blame anyone if they chose to step away for a few days. I think a lot of folks (particularly "the masses") forget that these are largely volunteer efforts, by people with day jobs.