Well, yes but not easily: this API will indeed allow developers to more easily develop third-party clients for kbin, but I don't think it is a 1:1 reproduction of Lemmy's API, so it will require significant work for clients to support both Lemmy and kbin.
Also, do keep in mind that kbin and Lemmy do not have feature parity (like Boosting or following users which are kbin-only)
That's understandable, I figured it wouldn't be interchangeable with the Lemmy API. He did mention in his Discord a little while ago that kbin support is planned, so hopefully that's still on the roadmap now that the API is almost ready.
Kbin federates with Lemmy and mastodon. Lemmy has more users so more people voting up things there, but a lot of that front page is posted from kbin. Devs are not focusing on lemmy unless they’re Lemmy people. There are devs focusing on kbin too. We now have an active kbin enhancement suite going, just like RES used to be for reddit. So customizing how you interact with fedi is more in your control. Artemis app is being done by @hariette, and beta users are super happy with it.
The active userbase isn't too far off from Lemmy's, roughly 40k compared to Lemmy's 70k. As for the content, it doesn't really mater what service is hosting the community since it's all federated. There are large kbin magazines as well.
In absolute numbers perhaps, but that's almost double the active user base. What's more interesting to me, however, is the respective growth. Kbin soared to 50k+ users extremely quickly, but has since then experienced a very flat curve. Wasn't Kbin's user base larger than Lemmy's a month ago? Or at least equal? It will be interesting if Kbin grows more rapidly with API and 3rd-party app support or if it will become more niche in the future, provided Lemmy's growth continues.
As for the content, it doesn't really mater what service is hosting the community since it's all federated.
This is definitely true, and thank god for it or this split of the Reddit refugees would have been catastrophic. It still was a problem for a while when Kbin had bugged federation, but it seems better now.
and kbin seems to federate REAAAALLLY slowly in my experience. A lemmy post will have 100+ comments on any lemmy instance, but then you view it in kbin and there's like 5 comments. My profile when viewed in kbin is days/weeks behind.
It feels so empty and like you're in the past lol.