When the explosion of new users happened, kbin.social was the only instance and it wasn’t ready for the growth. It was completely offline or disfuncional frequently and Ernest had to both disable federation and put up a CloudFlare captcha to slow down traffic to the site. So after all that lemmy.ml had to also temporarily block kbin.social because bei g unresponsive to lemmy.ml trying to federate was slowing down lemmy.ml. so people who were looking at both went to Lemmy.