But how could you get your hand to seamlessly meld into the fabric of the shoulder strap?

I helped do the easy scenario at large scale in a fortune 50 several years ago after the vendor thought they could get greedy on the support contract renewal. Only required small changes to a few files and packages.

Talos Linux is another unique option.

For most people, using https and dns over https (DoH) is probably all that’s needed.

Isn’t that because Dan hasn’t open-sourced his project yet

Wrong: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/blob/dev/LICENSE

and doesn’t let anybody else contribute?

Hmm, while there have been 158 contributors, a very small percent were from the other developers: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/graphs/contributors

This information is pretty easy to look up.

One way would be by implementing features the Lemmy devs have no interest in such as better interoperability with other fediverse platforms. If any added feature turns out to be well received and in demand, it would pressure the others to implement similar.