I made an account on Kbin, and I'm looking at posts from Lemmy and BeeHaw and Kbin and sometimes I forget to even check what the source is.
So am I accessing Lemmy through Kbin? Am I seeing the entire Fediverse through Kbin's interface? Am I reading Kbin, which gets its content from across the Fediverse?
In short, I'm wondering what the local terminology is for what I signed up for and what I'm seeing when I pull up Kbin.
BeeHaw is Lemmy, BeeHaw is just a specific instance like lemmy.ml. lemmy and kbin are 'group' based federated apps. Lemmy has 'communities' and kbin has 'magazines'. You can view lemmy communities as kbin magazines and vice versa.
I would say magazines and communities are the same but kbin magazines have an additional 'microblog' feature incompatible with lemmy.
Kbin is also more compatible with user based federated apps like mastodon due to the 'microblog' functionality. You can follow mastodon users from kbin which I don't think you can do from lemmy.
You can follow lemmy threads from mastodon,, but it can be difficult to navigate in my experience. > So am I accessing Lemmy through Kbin? Am I seeing the entire Fediverse through Kbin’s interface?
So am I accessing Lemmy through Kbin? Am I seeing the entire Fediverse through Kbin’s interface?
Yes and yes
Am I reading Kbin, which gets its content from across the Fediverse?
Not really. kbin content is from kbin. You can read lemmy and mastodon content from kbin.
Your logged into and interacting with your local instance. (kbin.social, it appears.)
Your local instance will store a local copy of remote servers' content for you to see.
When you interact with your local servers copy of content, you are telling your local server things like "I upvote this." "I'm commenting on that."
Your local server will then tell the remote server that "owns" the content that you "upvoted this" or "commented on that".
Other remote servers will then get these updates from the remote "owner" server.
So, the content is spread out over many servers and each owns their own local stuff but share it with remote servers. Then they all share all the various user interactions with each other so each individual person only really needs 1 account on 1 server to get access to the entire* fediverse.
*-There's defederation that comes into play which blocks some of that communication but we don't need to get into that here.
If the instance you want to join is federated, yes, you can access it, providing that your instance has cached distant content. Even from Mastodon you can reach lemmy/kbin users and posts.
Yes indeed. What you see is Kbin's local copy of activity that is occurring on other instances throughout the Fediverse. It's not the entire Fediverse though, just everything that your Kbin instance is aware of based on what its users have connected to via subscriptions to communities and users they follow.
I'm still new to the fediverse, so please take what I say with a pinch of salt, but when you create an account on the fediverse, you can access all the federated instances. Which is why you're seeing content from both kbin and lemmy instances.
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