First of thanks a lot for the effort that you put into creating lemmy. You have created a really friendly and welcoming place!
I have a question regarding licenses. When you started developing lemmy, what were the reasons for your choice of the AGPL? As you are marxist-leninists, did you also look into other licenses like the the Anti-Capitalist Software License?
If you are looking for UI inspiration, you could give !unixporn@lemmy.ml or its counterpart at reddit r/unixporn a look. As a linux novice you might be interested in the KDE,XFCE or GNOME customizations that are shared in these communities.
Windows 95 -> 98 -> XP -> 7 -> 8 -> OSX -> Arch (1 month) -> Gentoo (1 year) -> VOID (3 years) -> NixOS (4 years) (transitioning to Guix System now)
For reference, this was my editor hopping journey which started during my OSX days since I learned to program during this time: Sublimetext -> vim -> neovim -> emacs