an app launcher. Literally every other desktop on the planet has one, how this isn’t considered basic functionality is beyond me. Give your grandparents a vanilla GNOME computer and tell them to get to Facebook and you will see how necessary this is. Default should be dash-to-dock with intelligent autohide so you only see it when you need it. This would fulfill GNOME’s hangups about it while also improving usability, so I fail to see a downside.

GNOME does have a launcher, which works just like the launcher on Mac and Android. You can even select whether to see all your apps or only the most-used ones. I do agree that a taskbar/dock with intelligent auto-hide is a must, though (at least for my usability). That’s also not to say that some folks would rather have a Windows style launcher, and there are several DEs that provide that.

I don’t have an answer for you, but maybe you and your friends could get together and start your own? The beauty of the fediverse and all that.

Login issue reportedly fixed with 0.18.2 update: Lemmy.world updated to 0.18.2

What about running the Flatpak version of Brave? Flatpaks are containerized and should contain compatible libraries.

I’m a boomer and I’m here. Although I’m probably the exception since I’ve never had a Facebook account and you couldn’t pay me enough to touch anything Meta. Probably because I fit the rest of OP’s criteria: way over 30, tech worker, Linux user.

As @flloxlbox said, it will either happen organically or users will decide to merge communities, like the Android community did. It’s the way federation works, it’s not something that can be forced on people.

GNOME. Been using Linux since before GNOME Shell was a thing and when it became a thing it just clicked for me. In my opinion, it’s by far the most polished DE and provides the most elegant and intuitive launcher and workspace switcher of any DE or OS I’ve used. At least they did, until they fucked it up by moving from vertical to horizontal workspaces and made the workspace previews so small you can no longer see what’s in them.

Which is the downside of GNOME. Sometimes their developers are their own worst enemies. Fortunately, there are usually extensions to fix the most egregious “enhancements”.

Kbin already federates with Mastodon. It’s not a single feed, though, they’re on separate tabs. Kbin currently works okay, but per the devs it’s an early beta so there’s more polish and features to come.

For the record, I’m not sure that combining the two platforms in one feed would be desirable for most users. It seems to me that Lemmy and Mastodon serve different purposes: Mastodon is for broadcasting your opinions to mostly-passive followers, Lemmy is oriented toward conversation.

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This is what people aren’t getting. The fediverse, as it is now, is irrelevant to Meta’s plans for Threads. Meta views the fediverse as an inducement to get creators to join Threads. Per The Verge:

As Mosseri puts it, this is a move designed to appease creators who have grown increasingly wary of relying on the whims of centralized social media companies. “I think we might be a more compelling platform for creators, particularly for the newer creators who are more and more savvy, if we are a place where you don’t have to feel like you have to trust us forever,” he says.