kbin is newer and less polished. But yeah I personally recommend kbin over lemmy for exactly the reasons you posted.

Fediverse really needs onboarding pages that hides some of the wires.

Join Lemmy for example should highlight the content and UI, and a big "Join the Lemmy Fediverse" button. Click the button and it asks 3 questions and send you directly to account creation for an active instance matching your answers.

Frankly instance choice should be something people think about after they've been involved for a while, at least until we have a few multi-million active user instances to choose from

3 of the top 4 results for me are fediverse related when searching for "lemmy".

I don't think its the signing up, its the lack of centralization/community. reddit was a singularity, the community is protesting en-masse because they felt they were all part of the same thing.

to me, the fediverse is a segmented.. oddly connected group of overlapping communities. it lacks cohesion.

You're absolutely right that we have a bit of a terminology issue here, but one slightly advanced and techy thing to understand about the fediverse is that the fediverse itself is the "platform":

Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Calckey, etc., are software projects or processes that are running on some server somewhere, and ActivityPub is the protocol (kind of like a language) that all these processes use (to varying degrees) to speak with each other. As users, we interact with a specific server or service (like beehaw.org or kbin.social) that is running that software and sharing info with other servers through a protocol.

This is totally different to Reddit or Twitter, which are both the names of the service AND (probably, but we don't now) the software that the service is running behind the scenes. Naturally that makes it a bit easier to talk about, because we don't have any access to or knowledge about the software or protocols that they use, and we can just talk about the services.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that Kbin and Lemmy are replacements for Reddit (the software) while servers like kbin.social or beehaw.org are replacements for Reddit.com (the service), except they also talk to each other somewhat seamlessly. I'm logged into the server "kbin.social", which runs a software called "Kbin", which communicates over a protocol called "ActivityPub" to a bunch of users who are on other servers running other software.

In other words, Google searching for "Lemmy" isn't exactly a good metric, not only because Reddit is one of the biggest websites around and Google knows this, but also because "Lemmy" isn't the actual name of the service that we are using right now, just the software. If you tell someone to go over to a specific server (like beehaw.org, kbin.social, etc.) then they'll have a much easier time finding something that they can actually use.

Most of us are guilty of kind of glossing over all this stuff to keep things simple and easy to understand, but there are some layers of nuance to the fediverse here that make this a little bit more complicated than you're making it out to be imo.

The thing that worries me about kbin is that everything is located on one single instance. You guys are building a lot of centralization over there which might lead to a Reddit 2.0 scandal at some point

• posted from Lemmy

Me, reading this through lemmy (feddit): hmmm yes

But for real, I see what you mean with the first impression at join-lemmy.

Reddit:- You Google Reddit and your first result is Reddit.com. You click the link and are presented with the front page. You from scroll from a few hours and end up signing up and staying.

I don't think this is the path most people take to becoming new Reddit users.

I think most people end up using new social media sites because they get linked to content already on a given site that they like. This could be from friends sharing links, or through Google results from the site.