A lot of them pony up the “the fediverse is too confusing” angle. Even when it’s explained, they say “No, it’s too confusing” and refuse to even try to ask questions about where they’re getting lost.

I think this may be a disconnect in what you’re talking about and what they’re talking about.

As someone who mods some communities on Reddit that have talked about rehoming, the complexity of kbin/lemmy is a very significant and valid concern.

That concern is not something simple or trite that I or another mod would just need to ask about but “refuse to even try” - it’s that no matter how comfy it would be for me learn it, that same thing remains a barrier for each and every one of my membership that I’d like to have move over to here. Even if some of them will ask, not all of them will and many will instead see that issue as a ‘quit point’ in learning a new platform. The various Fediverse platforms have multiple of those stumbling blocks and quitting points baked into their overall complexity, as much as the complexity is a selling point in some regards - it also makes the space quite daunting to the relatively simple folks that make up the bulk of our community.

While considering lemmy/kbin for my community a sizable chunk of my energy has been trying to figure out what I’m going to need to teach community members as far as engaging with the platform and a new community here, and whether or not it’s realistic to put that amount of tutorial into something that’s still small enough they’ll engage with it.

On top of that, both Lemmy and Kbin don’t have much in the way of moderation tools. There doesn’t appear to be a spam filter and certainly no AutoModerator. Kbin’s API is (currently) read-only, so a bot can’t even be written to work like AutoMod.

This is a secondary but still super valid concern. It’s something that I hope gets resolved in the long term as Fed spaces grow, but I also know that I’m effectively relying on open-source or similar to adopt the Fed spaces, have them take off, and then make tools for them - because I’m not software enough to do that myself. We are smaller, but see a shitton of astroturf and spam compared to communities at 20K say - at the moment, Fediverse is really well suited to communities in the 10K population range, but it lacks some of the foundations to maintain order once it grows beyond a scope where manual moderation remains practical.

Some measure of platform automation makes so much of managing that space vastly easier, and at the moment there isn’t somewhere I’ve encountered that has the same level of development and depth regarding the community management side of moderation.