The British were so focused on whether they could, they didn’t stop to think about whether they should.

You mean items that should be generic commodities, but which companies customize in order to lock you into their ecosystem, or otherwise restrict what you can do? Like printer ink cartridges or Keurig pods with ID chips, as you mentioned.

• DVD region codes

• Camera lenses back in the manual SLR days. I don’t think there’s any reason old manual-focus Nikon/Olympus/Pentax/etc. lenses needed to be brand-exclusive. The companies could have all used the same bayonet mount and all lenses would be interchangeable.

Don’t forget half of them get jungle duty retaking the Panama Canal from * checks notes * a peaceful ally who has been doing a fine job of operating it.

God, every day feels less like reality and more like a fever dream.

When I was a kid we did sailboats instead of cars one year. To race we blew our boats along a trough filled with water. I’m amazed nobody passed out from hyperventilating! I still have my sailboat from 1989 tucked in a drawer somewhere.

Some of the noisy electronic toys will randomly make sounds when they are not being played with, to draw the child back to them. Find one of those toys and hide it in Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

To shreds you say

Also, consider going past the first page on FediDB and picking a smaller instance. I’m not knocking the big instances (I volunteer my time to two of the biggest, after all). It’s just that the whole point of this Fediverse experiment is for things to be distributed. Going by the numbers on FediDB, fully half of all monthly active Lemmy users are concentrated on the three largest instances.