Exactly. It's harder than it sounds to ask the right "why".

The thing to get across to people is that you don't need to understand it to use it. Hell, that goes for most things. The average person has no idea how an internal combustion engine works but can drive a car just fine.

Search-Lemmy is under development for this.

Not really. Also by your logic you can't trust anyone ever because there is always a risk they turn bad at some point in the future. All we can do is evaluate what we have in front of us at the moment. Current evidence suggests Ruud is trustworthy, committed and capable of running a large Fediverse instance.

Well, this was in regards to the Devs of the actual Lemmy backend.

If you're worried about where your money is going you can use Open Collective to donate, which provides transparency of where and how funds are used.

Well Ruud who runs .world also runs Mastodon.world which is a fairly large mastodon instance, so he is somewhat of a known quantity and has experience running large Fediverse servers. His mastodon server has handled a large population and donations happen through Open Collective for transparency as well. He also runs Calckey.world though that is much smaller.

The danger in randomizing servers is that some smaller servers not only have less than 99% uptime but are also just run by random regular people who couldn't handle the increased load and/or have no desire or ability to keep the servers running long term. It could maybe work if the randomization occurs from within a vetted list.

Account migration is a feature that has been noted for the future and would indeed be very important since it would essentially make the entire network bulletproof. Being able to move instances and/or link accounts across multiple instances would create the necessary redundancy and reduce fears of choosing a smaller instance as home.

Just gonna say real quick that Disco Elysium is a very special experience that I highly recommend. It hits you hard and can be very cathartic, especially if you have any personal experience with depression, addiction, failure, nostalgia, loss and/or regret.

I think it's a mix of things, as others have noted. Age definitely plays a part though, I think, and I've felt the same thing you have. The period of mid teens to early twenties is hugely formative and lots of preferences you acquire during those years settle in deep. I feel this mostly with music, nowadays. I remember being a teenager and constantly fiending for new bands, new artists, stuff I'd never heard before, the latest releases of my favorite artists. These days though I mostly go back to old favorites, stick to albums and artists I discovered during that 15-25 decade, even just play old records of my favorite artists instead of checking out their latest releases. Rarely do I get the impulse to go foraging for new stuff.

When you're young you have a smaller database of similar experiences, so everything new makes a stronger impression. The older you get, the more you experience and the more any new input gets dampened by good old habituation and comparison to older similar experiences. Simultaneously, nostalgia grows more powerful with each passing year and so old favorites get more and more appealing.

To add to this though, there has certainly been a shift in how games are made, and it's particularly noticeable in the AAA industry. I watched a video essay about the impact of the Unreal-ification of graphics in AAA games leading to homogenization of visuals, the proliferation of Ubisoft style open world collect-a-thon gameplay is very much felt (though maybe we're moving away from it finally), and in general high budget games often end up overly streamlined and soulless.

Indie games exist, and many are excellent, but they of course do lack the capabilities that come with larger budgets.

Finally, the optimal monetization strategies for video games are starting to approach a very solved state, which has led to many publishers pushing predatory set-ups and focus on subscriptions, battle passes, microtransactions and Games as a Live Service. I'm not the biggest fan of Josh Strife-Hayes, but he has a great video about this from a year or two ago.

Combine all of these things and it's not too unexpected to feel the way you do.

Return of the Obra Dinn. Discovering the story and mystery for the first time, putting the pieces together, looking for clues and drawing conclusions, it was a fantastic experience that can never be repeated so long as you remember even fragments of it.

The idea of combining the two isn't necessarily bad, Kbin has some good ideas and I guess that's why it's gotten popular, there are just some baffling stuff too.

The leftover terminology from Mastodon makes some sense (haven't used that one myself), maybe the founder thought the majority of users would join from there, but the magazine thing just confuses me since they are clearly just communities filled with threads. When I browse single picture meme posts or questions on AskKbin my first thought isn't "ah yes, Articles in a Magazine".

In addition to the backend, I'm not sold on the terminology used in the front end either, though visually it does look good.

Why call communities Magazines? Why am I starting a microblog when I press new Post? Why is upvote called Favorite and what does Reduce mean? And what the hell is Boost and how is it different from Favorite?

Still, the number one issue at the moment for sure is the slow federation and syncing with Lemmy. Communicating across different Lemmy instances is no problem, but Kbin<->Lemmy seems incredibly slow, with threads from Lemmy often lagging many hours behind when viewed from Kbin which makes it impossible to participate in conversations.

Is it even possible to pick just one?

Several of my favorite gaming experiences are one-time, non-repeatable. Solving the Return of the Obra Dinn is up there, but it couldn't possibly be my favorite game because I can never experience it again.

Playing Dark Souls for the first time is the same thing. Discovering the world, finding the intricacies of the interconnected map, struggling with and overcoming challenging areas and bosses. The relief of unlocking shortcuts and the amazement at the maps connectivity. It was the first game of it's type I played, and it was phenomenal, but coming back to it never matches that first playthrough. And let's be honest, the bosses feel downright mundane after having played the later releases.

Disco Elysium affected me in a way no other game has. Its themes are so relevant to me that it struck me on a very personal level and it was an incredibly cathartic experience that will stay with me forever the way any great book would. I actually found it more enjoyable the second playthrough too, however, is it really even a game?

Oh man. You're breaking my heart here.

While this is always part of it, I've replayed them a couple of years ago and they still hold up. So much of their charm hasn't aged at all: writing, characters, story and voice acting. Irenicus is just as sick of a villain as he was 23 years ago.

To add to the other replies, try the Lemmyverse search engine, too.

Lemmyverse is a search engine for Lemmy (though it doesn't find communities on Kbin (yet). It can help you find communities you're looking for, and also shows how big they are so you know where to go for most activity.

Sub.Rehab and RedditMigration.com are indexes of communities that have at least created a counterpart somewhere other than Reddit (though they don't track activity so some might be rather small still).

I have no doubt in my mind this will be an amazing RPG, I just hope it will also be a great Baldurs Gate. I have so many memories of those games, and they have such a legacy that I hope this will be an actual sequel with a real connection and real returning characters (playable or at least prominent, not just mentions and references). No matter how great it plays, I will still be disappointed if this ends up being Divinity: Dungeons and Dragons.

Kbin doesn't have an API and so it's probably less straightforward to dev for. Plus Lemmy is older and more established. I believe ljdawson said in a comment somewhere that he'll work on Kbin integration somewhere down the line. I think that's the way it will go for most of the apps.