I think from a factual basis your position sounds perfectly reasonable, I feel similarly about new things. (Perhaps there are other parts of the story missing though?)
There's a lot to be said for delivery. If you opened a gift an reacted badly immediately, that would hurt. Even if the gift was misjudged, it was probably meant with good intent. Accepting thankfully, acknowledging the intention, and THEN coming around to the "but you really should have checked in first for something like this" might be a good way to start.
Perhaps if it explicitly showed my subscribed communities first, and had a clear separator for non-subscribed communities. But I would prefer an option to not see stuff from other communities at all
Nah, because if if there's a post that's of interest to more than one community, and I'm only in one of those, then I probably don't want to see comments from those other communities, because they will be related to topics/aspects that I'm not here for (otherwise I'd also be subscribed to those communities).
I think there is potentially a lot of value in having separate crossposts per community... E.g. if a link touches on multiple separate topics (say, cinematography and nature), then people visiting an cinematography community would probably prefer to see conversation related to their interest..
Agree that crossposts from similar communities (same name) across different servers should be merged though (although there probably should be a way for community mods to opt out of that...)
Get a cheap/pirated DAW with some basic synth plugins. I'd recommend starting with the most basic subtractive synth you can find, plus a sampler, and some basic effects (delay, reverb, distortion, chorus). Limit yourself to that until you understand everything they're doing.
I like non-generative AI. Early artificial life sims (e.g cellular automata) are super interesting, and machine learning and xAI are great for science.
Just not that big a fan of the infinite slop machine helping the rich get richer at the cost of degrading our knowledge base and arts
Gonna leave this here, it's worth a read:
Asker vs Guesser culture