There have been lots of compatibility improvements with Mastodon from our side. However Mastodon seems to have almost no interest to make improvements from their side. I dont think there is much we can do about that, in the end project maintainers always care about their own users most.
With dansup there was some communication years ago, but it seems he lost interest in Lemmy.
Yep that was a regression which was recently fixed.
Check the NLnet milestones in updated OP.
Some company (dont know which) wanted to make a one-time donation of 500 Euros to get listed as donor on join-lemmy.org. Rejected because thats only for recurring donors. Does this count as weird?
Yes once we reach 1.0 there will be way fewer breaking changes and then it will be easier to do more frequent releases.
The best thing would be if Reddit goes the way of Digg. Seems that will happen sooner or later. The worst thing, maybe if funding stops and we are unable to keep working on Lemmy. But even then admins could still host Lemmy instances.
Would people really pay for Lemmy merch?
Very excited, and then very overwhelmed because everything started breaking left and right.
How would you suggest to make it more efficient?
Check the updated OP. We can definitely use more donations, at the moment we are getting around 4000 Euros per month which is not much for two fulltime devs. And code contributions are also helpful, there is an almost endless amount of open issues.
Then your (hashed) password would have to be copied to all servers, and the email as well for password reset. Seems very problematic for security.
There are such efforts on SocialHub and on a W3C mailing list. However devs of major Fediverse projects are rarely active there, because they are all busy working on their own software.