For me, I had my own reasons that were similar to Nougat's. Sensible, non-eye-burning interface. A frankly surprising admiration for what I'd seen of what would become my dev's personality and approach, where I hadn't felt anything but veiled contempt for an admin in decades. I didn't know about the other perks (individually muting instances, neat community tagging system, 70% compatibility with mastodon) until later, but those make me even more satisfied with my choice and I'm content to wait out the small stuff.

For inquisitive people, I'm not overly certain beyond what I've said. It could have been a fluke. It could be that, since lemmy was the first choice anyone ever mentioned, shitposters are just looking for the easiest way to have a good time. So lemmy got all the shitposters. And if you weren't interested in what lemmy had to offer, there was a very good chance you weren't interested in where the fediverse currently was in general, in order to bother reading through all the other options. A lot of people decided they didn't like how janky and different it felt and they just went elsewhere.

I could be overly-projecting, but people who kept looking long enough to stumble across kbin instead of choosing lemmy or giving up I think would tend to be the more anxious, detail-oriented types that are liable to do their homework before making anything approaching a decision. Which would...inherently make them more likely to be hungrier for that kind of thing in general? Which naturally meshes pretty well with the aforementioned nerdiness of those who were already here when we arrived.

I really don't want to make assumptions, though, or end up implying things like "Lol, lemmy got all the lazy chodes and we got the smart people." Especially between such closely-linked communities that started out as quite literally the same group. Expecting such a clear delineation would be a bit laughable, and we'll blend with each other like we always have. I have no interest in tribalism, I'm just enjoying the time period this platform is troll-less.

It's where I happened to land, but I've been quite happy. ernest is the dev, and he's tops. There's a KBin Enhancement Suite going already which includes a toggle for @username@instance display, as well as plenty of other things. hariette is developing Artemis as a kbin-compatiable mobile app for iOS and Android (which also promises future lemmy compatibility). The kbin interface is pretty clean and intuitive, and I'm looking forward to how it matures.