Kbin is the first Reddit alternative I looked at and i liked the UI so I stuck with it. I kind of assumed everything would be kbin. I thought I understood things. I thought it was kbin and lemmy separate but they federated and so I’d be able to access lemmy stuff from kbin. Which I guess is true. But now I’m confused. I look at all, and I see a post in m/main@sh.itjust.works and the post is from lemmy.world and it’s devs. I’m not subbed to m/main, so did Ernest curate /all and add it? Are people cross posting from lemmy into sh.itjust.works? I feel like I need a drawing or red string diagram.
kbin and lemmy are different softwares, but they are both used for link aggregation and the 2 softwares use a common protocol, so they can talk to each other. So there are kbin servers and lemmy servers, and they are all interconnected.
So now we can take this post as an example:
You are a user on kbin.social
You posted this question on /m/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world - this means the community you posted on is actually hosted on lemmy.world
lemmy.world then tells other instances that its federated with that someone just made a post on /c/nostupidquestions on its instance. what kbin calls magazines are called communities on lemmy, hence the /c/ instead of the /m/.
kbin.social and all the other instances will then also show this post, even though it originally was created on a different instance
curious, are there other kbin “instances”, like how lemmy has many?
Yes, there’s a few of them. fedia.io, for one. But kbin.social is probably the most active one at the moment.
yes, to view the other kbin instances you can go to the kbin landing page (https://kbin.pub/en), at the top nav bar under instances it’ll show the others.
ah ok cool! I started on lemmy so I’m just finding out about kbin.
https://fedia.io is the other big kbin instance. There are probably others, but they’re either not as well-known yet or are personal instances.
Is there a reason to make personal instances versus using kbin.social ?
You get to make the rules if you have a personal instance until the other instances defederate from you.
It’s a matter of preference. Some people may want greater control over what instances they federate with. Some people just want to tinker with the kbin software and play around with it. Others choose to do it so that can have a custom domain or so they can have a username that’s been taken elsewhere. The beauty of the Fediverse is that it doesn’t really matter that much where you go, since you more or less have access to pretty much everything anyway.
yes. so individual instances are like individual reddit.com websites. if one goes rogue/bad it can’t control the others. likewise, people may prefer smaller instances where they have greater influence/control over the site (either by owning it, or being in closer contact with the admin, etc).
some instances may have rules, or defederate from other instances, that may not be liked, so you might want to switch to something more favorable. for instance, beehaw has strict moderation and defederated from lemmy.world. whereas kbin.social federates with everyone. if you make your own instance, you have control over this.
There’s a few others, not as many as Lemmy I think. Most of the users are on kbin.social currently.
interesting. thanks!