I’m by no means an expert, and have a similar amount of play time. I opted to push through the main story since all quests scale the same and you need to get to Act IV to unlock the horse.

I’m just now doing some of the 50-100 stuff and while doing that I’m going through and getting some more of the flavor by doing side quests in the areas that I’m spending time in.

Yeah, I definitely can and likely will at some point, but I used to not need to. Oh well, I don’t think things will change any time soon.

Even with a 5.1 setup, I feel like I don’t get enough dialog out of my center channels in most shows/movies without everything being unbearably loud.

In the local news here, they said that only 2 of the 93 affected staff members were against the idea. During the soft opening people were skipping tipping or tipping poorly.

In some places outside of the US you get charged for still (aka tap) water

US, Colorado - no need to filter or boil the tap water here. One of the benefits of living at the base of the mountains I suppose

I’m alternating between Memmy and Mlem. They’re both great but I also prefer Memmy at the moment. The ability to tap on a picture and have it go full screen is just so useful.

I've been using ionos.com (formerly 1&1) and so far their support has been great and the price is pretty good. They originated in Europe, but have long ago since moved to the US and have datacenter in both the US and Europe. I chose them because I wanted something cheap with unlimited bandwidth and this ticked those boxes.

I think the federated nature of Lemmy/kbin will be what keeps it going. It’s not an all or nothing approach but rather many pieces coming together to make something truly interesting. I’m sure there will be plenty of growing pains and drama, but the Lemmy-verse is a community built by the community.

I’m seeing this issue primarily with communities hosted on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. Admittedly, that’s a lot of the active ones at the moment, but for some of the smaller ones I follow, they seem to show up.

Private and federation are mutually exclusive concepts. Private instances are ones that intentionally don’t federate - like a private company community that’s locked to their intranet. For self hosted Lemmy instances you just need to close registration. Then since no one can apply, the only use case for email becomes the Forgot Password button for if you forget your password and at that point you’re better served with a password manager.

This sounds like a great idea