Coelacanth

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, keeping the content flowing will be the most important thing, and it’s much less daunting than taking on moderator duties. Everyone on Kbin/Lemmy right now is basically an early adopter, so they might need to take more responsibility to keep momentum up. It’s too much to ask people who usually just read news on their niche subreddits to suddenly start up their own community here, but everyone can take one step “up the ladder” so to speak, and we’re already seeing this to some extent I think. Lurkers trying their best to be commenters, commenters putting up their own posts and regular posters starting their own communities.

While I agree with everything you said, it did also serve a tangible purpose on some subreddits as a barrier-of-entry to prevent bots from posting OF spam or whatever or stop new troll accounts from being able to post.

Makes just about as much sense as communities being called “Magazines” and threads being called “Articles”. There is a lot to like about Kbin but also a lot that boggles my mind.

I do like a lot of things about Kbin, and visually it’s much better than unmodified Lemmy in a browser, but it also has its own share of problems, not least with intuitiveness. I don’t understand why communities are called Magazines, and the terminology of “Favorite”, “Reduce” and “Boost” are very confusing to me. Trying to make a new thread might lead you down a microblogging path instead since “Post” sounds more like a new thread than “Article” to a newcomer.

There also seems to be much slower sync between Kbin and various Lemmy instances compared to intra-sync between lemmy instances themselves. Kbin also doesn’t have an API (yet?), but a more tech savvy individual than me will have to say how big of a deal that is.

Both Sync and Boost have large and loyal userbases and will probably attract plenty of users to Lemmy, and good Third Party Apps might help with first impressions and onboarding for new users.

Ultimately though, content is king. I liked Kbin better when I first made my accounts, but then we had a Race Week in Formula 1 and the community here was dead while discussions were happening on Lemmy, and since the sync was slow so I ended up over there.

I’m waiting for both Sync and Boost to come out with their Lemmy offerings and will probably end up with one of those. In the meantime, I’m trying Thunder and WefWef, but have also heard good things about Liftoff. Here is a list of the current (and upcoming) crop if you want to experiment: https://lemmy.world/post/465785