I briefly checked out kbin a few days ago, but took a deeper dive today... and I'm kind of on board now. Still don't quite get the relationships between magazines, threads, and microblogs, and unsure how federated content from platforms with a different structure and UX (say, Mastodon) will map onto kbin. But my big realization today is that I don't have to understand all that to get started!
If you forget about federation and microblogs for a bit, kbin.social seems like a basic but serviceable Reddit clone. You can find various nascent communities popping up that seem like they function similarly enough as they do on Reddit. Daily threads on @ethfinance, episode discussion threads on @anime, strong political biases already taking root in @news, etc. I can understand all that without caring what goes on behind the scenes. And I can explore the larger fediverse at my own pace.
The big challenge is just that network effects are too stupidly strong. Makes it way too hard to unseat incumbents. If I ever picked up a new hobby or video game, or wanted to see what the experts on home ketchup production thought about how different brands of sugar affect the mouthfeel of the final product, I could be sure to find a thriving community on Reddit discussing just that. It's tough to give that up. But right now the promises of federation and the hopes of creating an ecosystem more resilient to large-scale corporate BS are sounding pretty good to me.
But to keep things on topic, I wish I could sign in with Ethereum and have my profile and data controlled by my Ethereum address. Make identity intrinsically transferable across instances/servers, have native support for POAPs/NFTs, and possibly build a lot of identity tools around ZK attestations of some sort. I wonder if ActivityPub is flexible enough that a web3-oriented frontend could be developed to provide that kind of UX while largely relying on other instances for communities and content.