The clunky interface, the relative differences from reddit, the confusing organization, the less than ideal splitting between blog/thread/magazine that makes navigating it have an extra learning curve, the lack of any apps that aren't just a pwa that has the same flaws as the site, the fact that there's really only one server for kbin that's used, the list goes on.

And I like kbin, I hope it thrives and becomes popular enough that nobody ever has to consider a corporate run site again because there's multiple federated options.

But, just being real, lemmy is simpler and easier to use, and it's closer to the way reddit worked. Kbin is trying to be more than a link aggregator and forum. That's great! If that's what you're looking for, it's even better. But most of the r/efugees were and are looking for something familiar and comfortable. With kbin not having an API, app developers weren't jumping into it (other than hariette, and she's kick ass) so the r/efugees that were at least partially leaving reddit because of the attack on apps had no devs busting their ass to get out good ones.

There's no apps for kbin that are open use. PWAs are meh to begin with, but at least the lemmy UI via PWA matches reddit close enough that the learning curve is trivial. The kbin ui has to be navigated with the split functions in mind, and that's not fun when what you're really wanting is to keep doing what you were doing before spez fucked things up.

And that's what it comes down to. The surge of new users to the fediverse aren't here because of the virtues of the services. They're/we're here because reddit isn't acceptable now. Lemmy is just closer to what we had