The branding for kbin is perfect for capturing the reddit migrators. The biggest friction point for the Fediverse is choosing an instance. If I want to join Lemmy, googling Lemmy takes me to a landing page with no join button, telling me to go to these other sites. Some of these sites even actively discourage signups, creating so many places for a new user to churn.
Also, see the cases where the admins of a few Lemmy instances act badly: now the brand of every other instance is tarnished.
If I want to join kbin, I go to kbin, and I signup. How easy is that? I personally think this is why kbin has been getting a lot of traffic compared to Lemmy instances, and this benefit is lost when other kbin instances begin popping up.
In my opinion, it makes way more sense to market the instances individually rather than as a whole. Federation can be discovered at the users own pace, instead of being the main draw which will always be the content hosted. This does add a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma, but I do think it would end up benefitting the ecosystem as a whole.
It’s generally not great for everyone to congregate on the same instance, but I agree it does seem to be a pain point as it’s different than the ‘norm’ when it comes to social media. I think something that could help is instead of just listing all the instances and assuming the user understands how the fediverse works, maybe have like a short walkthrough that explains how it works and the pros and cons of signing up with the default server and then give other recommendations for which servers to join.
TLDR: I think funneling everyone into a default instance is a bad idea for the health of the platform but I do think a little how to guide on the sign up page could help lessen confusion
not to mention the health of the server
I could barely log in yesterday
Too bad there don’t seem to be many other active kbin instances
If I wasn’t in so much debt I would have hosted one and given it a silly name like fuckb.in or somethin