Coelacanth

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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".

Search-Lemmy is under development for this.

A lot of UX work still needs to be done for sure. Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but there are scripts to redirect links to your home instance if that's what you mean. Try these (requires a userscript extension like Violentmonkey):

FediverseRedirector

Lemmy Universal Link Switcher

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).