“Unified branding” kinda misses the entire mark of “federated but decentralized” that this network of services is supposed to be all about.

I don’t think it does. Decentralized doesn’t mean every instance must appear unique from one another, though they certainly can if that is their wish. There’s no reason why a group of common instances shouldn’t want to provide a unified approach to branding their platform.

You’ve mocked up a really clean looking theme, but I’d never use it personally because it’s light-mode and it would burn the eyeballs out of my head at night.

Thanks, the theme is just my usual rediggit for lemmy (the dark variant is coming soon). The point of the post was just to highlight the navbar logo concept.

Many instances will absolutely want to do their own branding across the board, and that’s totally fine, but I also believe that many would like to see a unified approach to the platform. The beauty of the decentralization is that site admins are free to run their instance however they like.