Same. I remember I viewed Lemmy first. I saw the sticky post saying to use different instances, so created an account on beehaw. Well, tried to. They only manually approved accounts, so I soon realized that wasn't going to cut it, as I wanted to use the site immediately (I think it took a week to get the email saying the account got created).

When I went back to look up suggestions for instances, I saw people suggesting to use kbin for this tanky reason, and thought, "well, that seems like a win win".

Kbin let me create an account and start posting right away. It hasn't so far shown any red flags. And in fact Ernest has shown nothing but green flags so far. One particular case that stood out was when he was informed that he didn't properly give attribution to some code he used (and was required by that code's license) and he immediately posted admitting his mistake and apologizing. I admire people being able to admit when they were wrong.

I don't personally feel like the UI or features of kbin are any better than Lemmy (though not really any worse either -- both seem to have some different issues). I think I'm somewhat still waiting to see how the feature development of the two might go. One worry I admittedly have is that of how many active devs each will have. I don't think any major software can last long on a solo dev. And getting community contributions is vital for scaling.