Kbin had a tiny lead for a while in active users, but that changed when lemmy.world hit the scene and we got the first Lemmy instance ready to accept a huge number of users without the controversy surrounding lemmy.ml.

Yeah, Kbin really wasn't ready for mass adoption, I heard about Ernest needing to activate Cloudflare protection to save the server, though I wasn't around for that incident.

Funny enough lemmy.world was created June 1st, what I think triggered the mass adoption of Lemmy over Kbin is actually Sync and Boost announcing they'd be making Lemmy apps. Two major apps moving over signalled that this was a serious alternative to Reddit, and most users wouldn't realise Kbin is federated and would just go with the name cited by those apps (Lemmy).

What's also interesting though is if we break it down a little further, kbin.social still has the most active users in a single instance. Lemmy.world has more accounts, but most of those don't post or comment.

What I find interesting about it is that every Lemmy instance sits at about 10-25% of the total user base being "active users", while every single Kbin instance apart from Karab.in reports over 50% if its users as "active", with some being at or close to 100%.

Either Kbin attracts a vastly different, more active userbase, or the software behaves slightly differently, and with "boosts" being based off of retweets it wouldn't surprise me at all if they get counted when determining "active users".

The latter would also be in line with the amount of activity I've seen on and from Kbin.social versus lemmy.world, though that is of course merely anecdotal.