Kbin started as a Lemmy fork called "karab.in" (carbine in Polish). Not sure about the story behind that, but I didn't like the sound of it. Now Kbin has been reimplemented in PHP, which is arguably a much worse choice for server software than Rust. Those two kept me away from it.

But the kicker is: right now, we're discussing this in a community hosted by Beehaw, which is running Lemmy, even if you can interact with it from your instance which is running Kbin.

So as for endorsing one or another:

• None of these instances have ads, so our content (for now) is about worthless.
• Both instances have donation links... but if you haven't donated, then you aren't supporting either.
• The devs for Lemmy and Kbin also have donation links, and you can support them by filing bugs, or better yet fixing some. If you haven't... well, still not supporting either 🙂

Using any of these without giving back, is not "endorsing" it, it's mooching off of it! So if you dislike Lemmy more... why not mooch off of that one? 😛

I think the case with Calckey is equivalent: whatever their ideology, as long as their work is OpenSource, just take it and use it for your own purpose. It does seem to be much weaker, though.

BTW Lemmy.ml is a very weakly political instance, focused more on Lemmy development. The "tankie" one is Lemmygrad, which most sane instances have defederated from... except Lemmy.ml itself, but just stick to "subscribed" or "local" and you'll be fine.