Kbin is barely a prototype, so I wouldn't say it has a real approach to the UI. It's about to go through a lot of change as contributors begin working on a more thoughtfully designed UI. Many basics are not even implemented in its current state, so expect it to change a lot. Also third-party apps will start showing up once an API is added.
That is, check on it again in a few weeks.
I think there is some confusion. Lemmy.ml is itself an instance. Hosting your own means not using lemmy.ml.
Yes, that's what it means. If you look under the names, you'll see "public" or "private." The way they are going offline is to make the subreddits private. The green ones are labeled private.
That would be cool, but he's been pretty clear that it is going to be the end of Apollo. It's a very complex application with a Reddit-specific backend service and lots of other assumptions that would just not work here. Maybe some of the UI/UX could be reused, but it would probably be easier to recreate it from scratch than to adapt the existing app.
I don't think the problem is limited to "morons." I understand this system and have operated federated services in the past, but it is a lot more work just to navigate this when compared to something like Reddit. I don't have a ton of free time, and I'd rather spend that time engaging with the community vs wrestling with the service or trying to find which instance has the most activity. I know this will get better as it grows, but a lot of people will just get fed up and go somewhere they can just socialize.
There are many instances ("servers") of the service running, and each one can have its own, local equivalent of a subreddit. We can see and interact with all of them. I just went through 15 pages of "magazines" and subscribed to communities with the same name on 2+ instances at least a dozen times.
Suppose I am interested in photography, so I subscribe to the photography community on instance "foo." Another user has the same interest, but they find the community on instance "bar" and subscribe to that. If I post on photography@foo, they won't see it. The community is effectively split — often into more than two parts.
This makes it really difficult to build an engaging community at a scale similar to Reddit's. Ideally, users will eventually congregate around just a few, but this is going to make early growth quite painful. And it isn't intuitive to newcomers.
Neither, though it behaves a bit like a mirror. It is a Twitter client that fetches data server-side.
Brief summary here: https://nitter.net/about