Now that some time has passed, what do you like and dislike about kbin?
I like that kbin is smaller compared to some lemmy instances. I also prefer the UI. Bigger communities tend to feel a bit overwhelming for me. I also appreciate how transparent Ernest has been regarding kbin's development. That said, it's been a bit challenging to figure out how to utilize some of the federation features that kbin has to offer--microblogging in particular. From what I've seen, people don't generally seem too interested in this feature, but I think it's nice to have.
I think - and please correct me if I'm wrong - that if you add items to the keyword box when creating a post/adding a link, your item shows up to mastadon users who follow that hashtag. I know that mastodon users occasionally interact with my links, and AFAIK that doesn't happen with Lemmy posts.
Fwiw Madison users can and do interact on Lemmy too. Although it's more of a one-way interaction at the moment (they can post to Lemmy, we can't post to Mastodon), so if Kbin can actually post there with hashtags that's pretty cool!
It's really nuanced, and I only slightly understand it. I think I can post a link from kbin to a lemmy community, and the keywords will be searchable for mastodon users - which is a primary way people use mastodon.
If you do a text post from lemmy and insert hashtags in the text, I think those hashtags are searchable on mastodon. But, if you do a link post, there's no mechanism to add hashtags.
Nah the second example you gave (Lemmy > Mastodon) sadly doesn't work, although I'm hopeful it might one day! Any attempts to add hashtags from the Lemmy side just turn up as plain text on Mastodon. Can you tell I've experimented a lot? 😅
I do enjoy posting from Mastodon to Lemmy though, and presume it would work the same way if I wanted to post to a Kbin magazine too. It's nice to have all the discussion from both platforms all in one thread, rather than posting separately. The trick is just formatting the post so it looks like it belongs on both platforms, which is easier said than done sometimes!
I appreciate the suggestion, however, I generally do as you suggested for other posts that I want to increase discoverability for. I also have issues when trying to bring in content from the rest of the fediverse into a particular magazine via tags. That said, I don't want to make this a troubleshooting thread as this isn't the intended magazine for that.