My understanding with this was that lemmy was actively blocking kbin content. I don't think it's kbin's fault, and lemmy/ml is being shady.

This was helpful, and I understand it now, thanks! It's just SO clunky though to have to use a different URL to get to the same place depending on what instance you're a member of. I don't understand what the benefit of all this added complication is. I feel like good programming should make it so that when I type !community@whatever.yay, whatever instance I'm in should just automatically link me to their version of the URL. Like kbin should know that that needs to go to kbin.social/m/community@whatever.yay without me having to change anything.

And in the meantime... we're going to have different communities for each instance because of how confusing this all is. Who decided that !memes@lemmy.ml was going to be the default memes community? Won't there be other communities that pop up at !memes@kbin.social and !memes@lemmy.world etc? It seems like chaos to me. How do I know which one is the right one?

I 100% agree. I should just be able to click a link to go to a community, and then there should be a simple way to subscribe when I get there. Like... that functionality may not be "basic" to program, but it is a basic necessity for ease of use and growth...

I picked kbin too. It seems like the most complete platform, and is more easy to navigate than lemmy... but that's kind of a low bar. I'm still very lost.

I still don't understand how to subscribe to groups that aren't on my instance. I sometimes was able to get it to work on my PC but it's impossible on mobile. This platform needs a lot of work.