All you have to do is make it more like Morrowind with some updated mechanics. The world doesn't have to be huge; smaller, handcrafted one is preferred to huge, lifeless one. Set it in an interesting, alien province, not generic medieval like Oblivion and Skyrim. And for the love of God, move on from Gamebryo/Creation engine, it's been outdated for over a decade.

You're comparing apples and oranges, reverse proxy and VPN serve two different purposes.

No, the best decision would be if they allowed us to disable shorts.

Us, selfhosters - sure.

Average person who value convenience over privacy/cost - no. They'll continue to pay and be in prisoned by the cloud.

Also, I would consider some legitimate licenced software more of a malware than a cracked one. If your software forces always-online license, comes with annoying startup processes, nagging ad screens, etc, it's malware. And if there's a cracked version without those things, I'll take the cracked version any day.

HA is geared towards selfhosted, locally controlled stuff (zwave, ZigBee, mqqt, local WiFi, etc). Because the cloud and privacy invasion is the mainstream, HA may require a bit more tweaking and technical knowledge to get up and running.

With that said, once you get it to how you want it, it's been working rock solid for me for a few years now. I've built my house around HA automations and can't imagine living without it.

Rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

The relaunched version aims to combine the nostalgia of the original Winamp with cutting-edge enhancements, such as integration with streaming platforms, cloud syncing

Noooo!

Not OP, but I have recently played it and I agree with all of OP's points

Correct, as long as the instance your account is in federated with all other instances you're subscribed to, you don't have to switch accounts.

Now, defederation is another issue if you want to see the widest possible amount of content. What's going to happen is ideologically opposed instances are going to defederate each other, so left-wing instances are going to defederate right-wing ones and vice versa. So if you're a user who wants to see the content from both sides, you'll have to create multiple accounts in each "cluster" of federated instances. It's kind of annoying to be honest, it makes it hard to discover communities just because your instance admin decided to defederate from them and encourages echo chambers, but it it's the best we've got.

Fuck YouTube shorts, I hate them with passion. I wish there was a way to hide them from my phone's and TV's YouTube app

The biggest problem with lemmy and decentralization right now is that for optimal performance you need to spread out the load relatively evenly between instances. The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there) and that naturally leads to clumping on one or few instances which causes it to overload.

The way to solve it is to avoid having generic "anything goes" instances and instead have instances be focused on a specific topic. For example, have gaming instance, a personal finance/investing instance, all things home ownership and improvement instance, etc. You can have multiple communities per instance as long as they stay within the same general topic. This way users will naturally spread out by subscribing to different instances based on topics they're interested in. And that will solve the performance issue we're seeing with lemmy.world or other popular instances.