For me it was the UI. Replies to comments on Lemmy are offset by, like, a single pixel. They’re more obvious here. Yup, that was the biggest thing for me.

I answered this the other day over at asklemmy so I’m going to cut n paste:

Why I joined

• had a more intuitive interface

• had a better aesthetic

• had a much cooler name

• the dev seemed like a cool guy

• before federation it felt exciting like being on the ground floor of something

Why I stayed

• has heaps of cool features and functions that are easy to use, like seeing upvotes, better blocking

• I like the Mastodon interface too

• turns out the dev definitely is awesome and everything is very open

• it has a really chill community

• I still just like it more than the various Lemmys

Extra features like (apologies for the run-on sentence) being able to see upvotes and downvotes on threads and comments like lemmy admins can, better integration with mastodon, every community has both a ‘reddit-like’ section like Lemmy/Reddit, and a ‘twitter-like’ section which as I mentioned integrates with mastodon via hashtags, we can block users, communities, domains and (soon) instances, we have a wide variety of user-style scripts via Tampermonkey to customize the UI (the base UI is also, subjectively, better).

Given its all federated, you also don’t lose anything by using kbin since you have access to lemmy too. Plus the dev is just the nicest, hard working son of a bitch lol.

Only drawback is we dont have an API yet, so for mobile you’re stuck with the mobile site, but the mobile site is also really good so eh. Once the API is up tho there’s a few apps which have already said they’ll support kbin as well, so that’s a matter of time.

Preferred the stock UI of Kbin, then I found out about userstyles and am in love with them. I’m a big fan of the microblogging, as it’s a place for posts that don’t warrant a full thread, but can still spark discussion. The politics of the Lemmy devs disgust me, so I’d rather not use a site using their software. Public upvotes/downvotes are great IMO, lets things be more transparent (like for instance I upvote all my posts, without it being public no one would know), plus it helps catch fake votes.

I also just find the name Kbin to be more catchy than Lemmy. Like GabeN, or k than.

Came for the UI. Stayed for the granular settings (including turning federation on and off) and the content just seemed higher quality (though that is very subjective)

Started with kbin today. After the first few interactions , it seems to get much better.

Edit: had to scroll down fully to type this comment. Is it just me or is it like this ?