At least with Lemmy it plainly is a Reddit clone. That's not an insult, it's just a fact. It has upvotes/downvotes, posts sorted into discrete communities that are volunteer made and run, crossposting, similar sorting options, and if you go to your own profile on Lemmy it displays your date of join as a "cake day". The similarities are both obvious and intentional.

I think Lemmy needs to add more unique features Reddit never had. The federation model is very novel and fundamentally different but also can be confusing. It needs more than just that to be different.

(I can't comment on Kbin as much because I don't use it.)

Exactly, thats why i disagree with naming new instances as "feddit". Sure, lemmy could be considered a "federated reddit" but at some point we should be able to detach it from that simplification.