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.
Personally I needed reassurance that an instance at least appears to be committed into fighting hate speech, especially as a gay guy
As a similarly sorta-but-not-super-techie guy, I agree. Kbin nailed the presentation of the Fediverse by introducing a UI and experience that is remarkably similar to Reddit. For that reason alone I hope Kbin comes out as the most successful (or at least viable) alternative.
The moment we approached the Fediverse, we heard about the creators of some of these places holding some extreme viewpoints, and we are hesitant about the type of people this may attract. Don't know firsthand how true that may be, but we sure as hell don't want to sign up to something that ends up becoming a sort of Voat.
The reassuring thing is that this exodus is completely different in nature than the one that ended up stampeding to and destroying Voat. The majority of damaged individuals who migrated back then... well... they already migrated back then, not now.
I don't care if a site has stuff that caters to a crowd with viewpoints that I don't share, as long as they aren't hassling me.