The branding for kbin is perfect for capturing the reddit migrators. The biggest friction point for the Fediverse is choosing an instance. If I want to join Lemmy, googling Lemmy takes me to a landing page with no join button, telling me to go to these other sites. Some of these sites even actively discourage signups, creating so many places for a new user to churn.
Also, see the cases where the admins of a few Lemmy instances act badly: now the brand of every other instance is tarnished.
If I want to join kbin, I go to kbin, and I signup. How easy is that? I personally think this is why kbin has been getting a lot of traffic compared to Lemmy instances, and this benefit is lost when other kbin instances begin popping up.
In my opinion, it makes way more sense to market the instances individually rather than as a whole. Federation can be discovered at the users own pace, instead of being the main draw which will always be the content hosted. This does add a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma, but I do think it would end up benefitting the ecosystem as a whole.
i think there is a way to move your account from one instance to another, but even if there is a way, it wouldn’t cover the case that an instance is already offline. Yes, generally speaking it is nice and correct approach to “choose a smaller instance”, but when you don’t know who runs it behind, it is actually other problems that come up, as you already know first hand.
To be fair they handled the closing as well as anyone could do. they left it in read only for quite a while for people to download their stuff. they gave everyone notice. etc. but the point remains.
There is also Calckey if you haven’t tried it yet. It has a lots of useful features compared to mastodon. You can migrate everything to another instance very easily.