Kbin/Lemmy and Mastodon remind me of Reddit and Twitter back when the communities on the platform felt more like, well, communities. I don’t think Kbin is quite at the critical mass yet (and personally I don’t like either Kbin or Lemmy’s UIs, while I do love Ivory for Mastodon), but I’m actually really enjoying the platform. Hopefully it continues to grow organically.
Not yet, but I do think that is something that should be implemented by Kbin/Masto/Lemmy etc regardless of what Meta does. There will always end up being instances that cater to niches that specific users won’t want to see/interact with. Again, personally I think that should be a user level decision, not a instance level one.