When I visit kbin.social, I see new posts regularly. On other servers posts stay on the frontpage for multiple days. This is also true if I switch their sorting to “hot”. So that is probably not the difference.
What is kbin.social doing differently?
The websockets work has been merged. I’m using it on my instance now, but there’s no release yet. It’s been really stable for me so far, so I’m hoping there aren’t major issues and they can push it out soon.