What is the difference between Lemmy and kbin?
I'm not sure I completely understand the differences. Are they seperate or somehow connected?
Also I've read you can view kbin instances on Lemmy somehow. How does that work if they're two different things?
I'm using Liftoff is it somehow possible to view kbin instances on there?
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They are two separate projects with similar goals (implement a Reddit clone). They both use the activitypub protocol, so they can generally interoperate. Other activitypub based services, such as mastodon, can also interact with either Lemmy or kbin, but in a more limited and clunkier way.
Lemmy was started first so there are more servers and more users, kbin is more recent.
A good visualization of this can be found on FediDB. Active users on kbin has recently surpassed those on Lemmy.
That's a huge jump on the 13th, I wonder what happened...
Lemmy had login issues
It’s very obvious a bug. They did not almost double their active users in a day.
I've got accounts on both but there isn't an Android kbin app yet, is there?
There's one in alpha over @ArtemisApp , but as for a publicly available one, I'm not aware of one - no. Most people are happy with the PWA though.
Kbin saw more relative growth in comparison recently though. How well they can communicate with each other always depends on the implementation. For example, I think the microblogging in kbin could definitely be more fleshed out to be able to communicate better with actual Mastodon. Right now it goes more in just one direction.
So are they in direct competition? Or are we able to see what each other is posting?
We can see the posts on both platforms (except for the case of de-federation).
Competition is an odd topic for open source software. For example, whilst mastodon, kbin and lemmy are all competing for attention, they are collectively making the activitypub ecosystem more attractive.
A similar thing happens with linux: Oracle, red hat, canonical etc all compete for market share, but pay for developers to work on the wider linux ecosystem (the kernel as well as GNOME and other apps etc)
They interoperate, so a Kbin user can see everything on Lemmy and vice versa.