Reforming the GDPR is in principle a good idea because many of the terms used in it are so vague that it’s completely unclear what it does or doesn’t mean.

Somehow I suspect that improving this isn’t what’s going to happen…

I don’t think I understand the question.

The Internet isn’t supposed to have a “center”, at all. If it ever does, something has gone wrong.

Federation, like what we’re doing here, can make it so that everyone’s personal “center” can be whatever platform they choose to use most of the time. Someone trying to communicate may be using an entirely different one, it will still get federated to whatever you prefer.

Well, for most real-world programming languages, you do have to teach syntax. You do not have to use the word “syntax”, you can call it something else.

Obviously there are things like Scratch that are intended for your exact use case.

I don’t think you need to use the word “syntax” at all when teaching anyone basic coding. There are many ways to paraphrase the concept. It is kind of an odd question, why that specific word?

In any case, the IPA above doesn’t seem “unpronounceable” at all to me as a native speaker of German and fluent speaker of English. The pronunciation isn’t intuitive from the spelling, that is quite a different thing from being unpronounceable.

I don’t use one except for work (to connect to corporate networks).

A VPN mostly changes which entity you have to trust (from your ISP to your VPN provider). I don’t have a reason to distrust my ISP any more than any VPN provider. I don’t have any need to regularly get around any geoblocking.

When I do privacy-sensitive things, I use Tor, which is actually effective at hiding who I am and what I am doing.

That would cause me to miss many interesting threads that were created at a time when I happened not to be looking at Lemmy.

“New comments” it is for me, that causes threads to get bumped to the top as long as other people still find them interesting.

yes, this is how we did it, only we lived in an apartment where there were only so many possible hiding places, so it was never an enormous challenge in later years :D

QWERTZ because I’ve been living my whole life in Austria and this was always the default. Every time something is set to QWERTY (and my keyboard is still physically QWERTZ), I have no idea where most of the special characters are and have to mash the keyboard in order to find them. I know @ is shift-2 and / is to the left of the right shift key, but most of the others, uh…

Celebrities (especially politicians) younger than me existing.

Have you tried “new comments”? That works best for me because it makes sure that more interesting (more commented-in) threads are displayed more often, but I neither see the same stuff over and over again nor am likely to miss interesting stuff just because I don’t look at Lemmy all the time.

A legal question without the information where in the world you live (country, state, province) cannot possibly get reliable answers.

no, there it was the other way round, pay attention

That isn’t steam, it’s smoke. Smoke from the smoked hams we’re having. Mmmm, smoked hams.

Lemmy and Mastodon have somewhat different purposes and integration between them is never going to be perfect. :/ Ultimately you’ll always get better results if you post to the platform you mainly want to target; posts sometimes being visible on the other one too is a side effect.

What would probably be useful for purposes like yours is to have some kind of software that allows the creation of arbitrary or near-arbitrary ActivityPub objects with arbitrary audiences which can include one’s followers or any number of groups. I don’t know how feasible this is or whether someone has already done it.

A few months ago I saw a post on a relatively large Lemmy community that had clearly been intended for the author’s Mastodon followers, but they tagged that Lemmy community (it had a name relevant to the content) apparently not knowing this would publish it to Lemmy. As I recall, this got >100 upvotes on Lemmy, but the Lemmy community’s mods deleted that post after a few hours. (Maybe some readers of this saw it too, it was to a “Europe” community and its content was something like “musKKK get the fuck out of EU politics”.)

imagine a society where everyone was a doctor, lawyer or engineer, that wouldn’t work because we need people to do other jobs too

[email protected] is a community that gets a lot of posts like that, try looking at that.

They are (probably), just not unilaterally. If the federal government (Congress) passed a bill allowing it, who would be there to stop it? This is how it is in most countries.

Ultimately, “legal” isn’t a very good claim to make on these questions… a secession that is successful will obviously be considered legal by the seceded country.

You may find this interesting: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-gets-self-determination

and if that had succeeded, the UK parliament would probably have consented to Scotland becoming independent. If the national government agrees to secession, it’s always legal.

Lemmy posts that are federated to Mastodon appear there with the community name as a hashtag. You can view your Lemmy profile from your Mastodon instance and see what got federated to that instance and how it appears there.