I’m going to present the opposite opinion to yours here. Kbin represents the best way forward for social media, to me. If we can get a working PeerTube integration after Threads federates, I’m all set. It’s what Google Plus was supposed to be, it’s why I first (as a user) used TweetDeck back in the day. It puts everything in one place again. I was a LiveJournal user back in the day, which was another place like this - communication & community, but individual places for your thoughts. I tried Tumblr for a while and it was close to an LJ replacement.
Everything since then has fractured and fragmented so we have very aggressive echo chambers, but no private places. This might be able to give that back to the users.
I accept that it can feel like drinking from the firehose at the start. It was to me at first too, but I was aware of Lemmy early on, and I was on two Mastodon instances that didn’t cofederate. I knew what I was going in for. I stepped back from Kbin when a known tech issue degraded my experience, and it’s been fixed. I think the thing is that Kbin allows you to curate your own experience, rather than be tied into doing one thing or another all the time.
I think when Kbin is ready for prime time and when the major issues are fixed, there might be a need to look at the first-timer experience, maybe even a tutorial. Because it’s not a beginner focused interface. It’s meant for us who want it all back in one place, and accepted the burden of experience that means.
The best possibility is something like I’ve done. I split my social media time between here, Reddit, Facebook, Threads, and a Mastodon instance that doesn’t federate (in addition to being a viewer on YouTube & PeerTube). You can’t hold all the people all the time. It’s just not feasible. So yes, people going back to Reddit is expected. But it’s when they come back and find something they want that’s important.