I guess it's both. Met a lot of kbin people in the past few days, so I went to check how this here looks from there. Kbin interface + Lemmy content seems like the best of both worlds, but the interoperability is pretty broken, sadly.
Personally, I'm here for the interface. I tried getting into Lemmy. It was unnecessarily arcane, and unnecessarily arcane things usually don't prosper in these scenarios.
Edit: well snap! It's true! Thanks kind Internet stranger! You just made my summer! Sucks it's on Hulu though. I was just about to cancel that service.
Only reason I picked kbin was because of the interface. No offense, but lemmy seems a little janky at the moment. But it doesn't matter, we're all here anyway.
Federation is no more wonky than between regular Lemmy instances in my experience. I've had issues with both at times.
It was only for a few days when the Reddit protest started that federation was barely working at all, it's been mostly fine for quite a while now!