Federation, the hallmark feature of kbin, is switched off temporarily. Check out the kbin-alternative Lemmy to see how it works: The homepage of the lemmy.ml server curently also displays threads originally created on the lemmy servers beehaw.org, lemmy.world, and feddit.de. In the comments of such threads, you see accounts registered on a variety lemmy servers, such as lemmy.one, sh.itjust.works, sopuli.xyz, etc. Federation means the servers talk to each other to enable cross-commenting and cross-viewing.
this is the killer feature, and I honestly don't think it's a great idea to try to have a community on an instance that isn't part of this federation (yet). I like kbin, I think it looks better than lemmy and it feels great to use, but not being connected to the other (thriving!) communities out there is probably not worth it