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.
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.