I believe you can replace start with the command that is suitable for your system (e.g., xdg-open for linux).
Who is this particular developer
As far as I understand from the discussions about the topic, Maxim Dounin was one of the few core developers of nginx. Looks like Wikipedia has already been updated.
I don't follow it very closely, but as far as I know, they are the only one implementing the open protocol they designed (which doesn't interoperate with ActivityPub). However, there seems to be some efforts for creating a bridge: https://www.docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed
As you said, there are some recognizable faces and that may impact the adoption. But not being compatible with ActivityPub is a real bummer.
The way I commit on my private branch is different than how I merge those commits to the main branch. When working on the private branch, things can get messy and if they do, I just try to keep certain things separate from each other (refactorings and bug fixes should not go into the same commit). Once the work is done, I do a interactive rebase to tidy things up and then merge them afterwards. Sometimes the changes are not that much and it becomes a squash commit. I would definitely refrain from creating 100 (insignificant and possibly back-and-forth) commits on the main branch.
I think you have a better chance if your instance focuses on a topic instead of being general purpose. That's the reason I chose programming.dev. All communities there are related to programming so when I sort by "local" I see something interesting even though I haven't subscribed to that community. And that increases my interaction with those communities.
C# is what I use at my day job and I think it's a very good language. It's feature rich (some people make fun of it for the fact the language team keeps adding new features). If you are familiar with Python and Typescript, that means you are reasonably familiar with object-oriented design. So, depending how you look at it, it may be very rewarding (since you will be able to quickly build on things you already know) or boring (since conceptually you will be mostly doing OOD). If you are interested in this path, Kotlin may be another interesting language which looks quite similar to C#.
Functional programming is all the rage now. So, if you want a real challenge that will help your programming skills no matter what, you may want to start looking into a language in this family. Haskell and F# come to mind. But there are many others.
Rust is also very trendy. In some instances it's replacing C and C++. It makes one think about lower level details of software. It's also a good language to learn if you want to be familiar with WASM. So, it may be an interesting challenge to take. Lemmy is written in Rust, so you may as well contribute to the platform. There is a lot to be done :)
If you don't already feel proficient in SQL, that would be an important skill to obtain along the way. Databases aren't going anywhere and it's a whole different world.
That said, you may want to focus on general things like design patterns and development methodologies (TDD, etc.) to broaden your horizons. Writing code is one thing. Writing high quality code with few bugs is a difficult thing to do and a great skill that only comes when one understands the best practices of software engineering.
Hopefully this helps. Good luck with your endeavors.
Here is my understanding:
Recently, a security vulnerability of Lemmy has been exploited by some malicious actors. This lead to some instances going down. The vulnerability has been fixed with version 0.18.2-rc.1 of lemmy-ui. But due to the way Lemmy issues and uses access tokens, the sessions has been invalidated in the database. So, the admins are recommending the users to log out and log back in if they haven't done so after the upgrade to version 0.18.2-rc.1 of lemmy-ui.
But I may be wrong. Perhaps others can provide a more accurate description.
Good code is code that is easier to change, and microservices are that by design. No wonder microservices end up being better code.
Microservices architecture by itself doesn't guarantee making anything better. Making services smaller doesn't automatically make easy-to-understand code. That's why a lot of companies that didn't pay attention to what they are doing went from monolithic architecture to "distributed big ball of mud" or "distributed monolith". Just like any other architecture pattern, for microservices to work, the team needs to make conscious decisions to overcome the challenges specific to their architecture.
Careful with Paul. He may starve.
I think I will quit at this point.

In my experience, interview culture differs depending on the country. So, it would be better to provide some context around that.
I wouldn't spend more than 2-3 hours on a take home challenge. I would politely decline such a requirement and move on to contact other employers even if the potential employer offers paying my 30h+ hour work week preparing for the interview. In my opinion, a "take home" should be a conversation starter so that you can ask questions and try to understand the candidate's thinking. But, as I said, it may differ according to industry/country, etc.
Don't they already have the names Leap and Tumbleweed? Changing the name to Leap would make sense since it's the name of the "official LTS" version. At this point it sounds like "openSUSE" is the name of the project and not the distro. But I haven't been following them closely, so perhaps I'm wrong.