It was confusing at first

msdos622@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 1126 points –
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I still don't get it lmao

I made an account with kbin because the interface most resembles reddit, but apparently that means I have a lemmy account or something?

It might help to think of it like email. If you sign up with gmail, you have a gmail account. You don't necessarily have a microsoft account but people @outlook.com can still send your @gmail.com account email and you can still read it no matter where it's from

In a similar way, you have a kbin.social account. You don't have a lemmy account but you can still see posts from people in lemmy.world

  • you can still see posts from people in lemmy.world

So if I go to kbin.social homepage, I am in fact seeing posts to any number of sites? Or is the notionof a site not accurate? I'm still kinda confused. Despite my age I'm a fucking luddite lol

Yep, (despite them saying kbin.social beside the title, not sure why that happens) I crappily edited this to show where the ones on my homepage comes from. And while it's technically correct to say sites, it's known more so as instances for this. You can check the instance a post is on by hovering your mouse over the name of the community and waiting for the popup to show it.

You don't have a lemmy account, but kbin gets content from lemmy pushed to it. So you can subscribe to subs that are on Lemmy. That doesn't mean you can't sub to the kbin equivalent; in due time, both may have a memes sub. But if you prefer lemmy over the kbin, you can see and interact with that lemmy content from here on kbin. You don't need to be on Lemmy to do it, the instances are federated.

Likewise, say in the future a sports-only instance is created. It exists solely for sports headlines across all the leagues of the world. It is way better than content on kbin. If kbin federates with that group, you can see and interact with that content.

Say there is a group that doesn't meet your instances ideals. They like to be inflammatory and provocative because they can. Your instance can not federate with them, so you won't see that content when viewing the All section of your instance. Likewise, they won't be able to interact with content you post. This prevents brigading and intermingling of groups that would only argue and conflict.

You can enjoy all the content of any federated instance from whatever platform you want.

So let's say we're a group of ships, call it a federation, and one ship decides I'm leaving the group. What happens.

They have a radio. They can still hear what were saying, and can say stuff on the radio, but we ignore it.

Doesn't work the greatest, cause we literally won't hear it at all because it's blocked by the instance so no one hears it period, but kinda works lol