They can contribute to the same communities, but communities live on specific instances.
The main difference between instances is the moderation policy and who runs it really, but nobody is generally missing out anything depending on the instance they choose.
There is one exception to the above, which is when instances defederate each other. Imagine that instance A is full of content that is not accepted on B and C, B and C can defederate A to stop "talking to it". Currently beehaw has defederated Lemmy.world because of the amount of users and moderation capabilities, for example.
So would “communityA” on beehaw have different content to “CommunityA” on Lemmy.world due to the defederation/(block)
Even with federation, communityA@beehaw.org would be a completely different community from CommunityA@lemmy.world. (like email: mazkarth@gmail.com is a completely different account to mazkarth@hotmail.com)
What federation does for you is that you, on lemmy.world, can access them both with a single login. (email: you can write a mail to mazkarth@hotmail.com from within your gmail webmail)
Where does kbin land on this list? When I signed up for kbin it appeared it was the most popular or at least close to the top. I'm surprised to see it's not on this list.
It's not on this list because it's not a lemmy instance, it is just linked with lemmy via the fediverse. There's a separate list for kbin instances here: https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list
Are Lemmy and Kbin two different pieces of software that do mostly the same thing? Kind of how you can open a PDF file with Acrobat or any number of other PDF viewers?
I'm curious what about that instance made it so popular? Isn't it just another Lemmy codebase? Intuitively I would have thought lemmy.ml would have grown but I'm not super familiar with lemmy land
Who wants to bet the bot farms are run by Reddit? Haha! Regardless, degenerating from them is easy or so I hear (I don't envy the admins having to defederate from bot farms every 20 minutes though!)
It was tongue in cheek but seems like a weakness in the federation model unless I miss something.
I look forward to the Lemmy wars. I hope we get a good 5 years before the opportunists figure it out and start exploiting the 'power' that will come with who can federate with you.
Yeah, it's expected to take pride in something like that only because it's been us vs them for almost as long as the internet has been around. Now we can all access everything everyone else can access (hi from kbin!), so there functionally IS no "them."
I've been trying a lot to shift my own mindset because not only is it just....making another reddit situation if we put all of our eggs in one basket, being competitive about someone else's instance is literally the same as being mad at someone because their phone uses a different area code. You might get a general idea about them if they have one that's well known, but culture is the only difference between any of us. And with federation, even that may not stand the test of time.
I don't know if it's temporary, but you can't post from Lemmy.world to Kbin, or even see any federated content from KBin. Also, anything I post from KBin doesn't show up on Lemmy.world.
Also, if you go to Lemmy.world and view this thread, there's 174 comments and counting. They aren't showing up here. Something is wrong with Lemmy.world federation.
I did think it was oddly slow for a headline like this, but I mostly likened it to posts getting any attention on the fediverse being like roulette still. Has to be temporary, I know it's been spotty for at least a few days. Is sad for the time being, though :(
I've been investigating this more. It seems to be a problem with Kbin.social... I can view anything on lemmy instances from Kbin, but I can't view anything on Kbin from lemmy instances. I can't search my own name, I can't search Kbin.social communities from Lemmy (tried lemmy.world and beehaw.org) ... so I don't know what to do. This problem basically kills kbin.social for me if it won't federate properly.
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