Thus far he's proven to be a great guy, but in case he lives long enough to become a villain, yes - he owns this instance, and if he's ever taken over by some space parasite, he has the ability to shut down this instance and delete everything uploaded to it; but the beauty of the fediverse is, if you don't trust an admin of this instance, you can join a different one, and still talk to people here; if you don't trust any admin, you can spin up your own instance, and it will still be able to communicate with all the others; and if you don't trust anyone, even yourself... well, fediverse will not solve that problem.

That would depend on what kind of game you want to make, and what do you mean by "from scratch" (hopefully not the Scratch programming language - that one I can tell you, you should not be using).

If you're planning on creating everything from scratch, including the game engine? With a "very limited background in programming", I would advise against it, but if you're stubborn enough, you could get it done in a couple years. But you would not be constrained to any specific language - you could use anything you'd like, even though some may be better suited for the task than others.

Most AAA game engines are still built with C++, and that's the one to use if you're very serious about it and want good performance with good 3D graphics - you'll find a lot of resources, libraries and bindings for it. On the other hand, it's considered one of the most difficult mainstream languages to learn.

If you only need 2D graphics, and don't need to simulate a lot of stuff, you can focus on finding a language that would be easier for you to learn. Python is considered a good starting language, and despite being slow, it should be good enough for the task.

If you're planning on actually making a game, you probably want to use an existing engine and build from there - all of my own twenty-something attempts at creating my own game engine have ended with "ooh, so that why they don't do it this way" instead of a game. There are lots of different ones to choose from, and again, depending on how complex the game is supposed to be, you can use Unity with C# or Unreal with C++ for advanced 3D (Unreal also has Blueprints, which would be... well... Scratch-for-Games - visual scripting, an editor that does not require a knowledge of any programming language); or, for example, Godot for 2D and simple 3D, with C# or their own GDScript, which is a mix between Python and Javascript, and pretty easy to get a hang of.

So, my advice would be to find an engine that looks intuitive enough for you, and learn whatever it uses for scripting - if you decide to move to a different one with a different language later, it is much, much easier to learn a second language than it was to learn your first.