Do note that you can't currently message users on other instances from kbin. The button will still be there, but it will bring you back to the homepage. I believe Ernest said something about it being "unimplemented," so I'm assuming cross-instance messaging will happen someday, but is probably not a high priority at the moment.
I probably would have enjoyed what little I did of Utopia much better with a guide. Half of my playtime was spent trying to figure out which button to press to get my current goal to pop back up on the screen again. (The other half was spent running around looking for an alternate source of carbon, because I got distracted while going out to mine for it and started mining other things that I didn't actually need and promptly rendered myself unable to mine anything at all.)
So yeah, I think it's safe to say that having something to refer to to see exactly what I should be doing at any given moment would be helpful for me. Thanks for the links.
And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads.
What if the defederation happens in the other direction? Defederating an instance is a lot like banning a user, and I'm not sure if there are any mainstream social media sites that I haven't heard abuse their ban system. If other instances start becoming more popular because people want to use them to talk to Threads, that gives Threads a lot of power over which of those instances are allowed to thrive. In the worst case scenario, it could easily kill an instance if too many of their users were there for Threads and Threads decides to cut them off.
A fediverse that is popular because it can talk to a centralized app doesn't sound like a particularly healthy fediverse to me.
When people go to Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy, Firefish, Misskey, etc., they do so knowing they're going to the fediverse. When people go to Threads, most do so because they have an Instagram account.
This is my main concern.
Personally, I don't care if the fediverse grows. I just care what it grows into. The fediverse has a nice community at the moment because everybody on it made a conscious decision to be here and not somewhere else. Threads users will not have made that decision. Furthermore, they'll outnumber the rest of us enough as to have no incentive to try and fit into the preexisting community here (which isn't helped by the fact that they've already been their own isolated community for awhile).
I second all the suggestions except the currently reading/online one: in my experience, seeing "currently reading" statistics just makes dead places feel more dead. It's also not a useful statistic: it doesn't tell you how good a post is, or provide any information about the poster, or even show how popular it is (because you can't really extrapolate about the average engagement from only one datapoint). You can't do anything with the number.
Yes, you do.
You can also connect to non-kbin sites, including Lemmy and Mastodon! They all use the same protocol to be able to talk to each other.
It's usually easier to search via external sites (https://lemmyverse.net/ and https://browse.feddit.de/ are the ones I've been using). You'll still have to manually copy over the magazine name in order to subscribe for it, but you'll get a wider variety of results without having to go to each instance individually.
The Kbin Usability Pack userscript adds a bookmark feature: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469597-kbin-usability-pack
There's a userscript I'm using that provides a bookmark feature (among other things, most or all of which I think are toggleable): https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469597-kbin-usability-pack
No built-in feature as far as I know, though.
I've been doing similar; been using Firefox, but Chrome is installed for its browser-wide automatic captioning. Not something I need often, but I rely on it for the occasional remote meeting here and there. I'm sure free automatic captioning applications exist for my operating system, but I'd have to actually test each one to see if they actually work, and it's just been so convenient keeping Google's around.
(Speaking of which, if anybody happens to have recommendations for free automatic captioning software that works on Ubuntu, I seem to be in the market...)
I've had it take up to a week for a community to show up after I've searched for it.