ELI5: ActivityPub and federation
I'm really excited to jump on the Activitypub/Fediverse train, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around how it works. Kbin is federated (or its supposed to be, apparently DDoS protection is hampering that?), but I'm not sure how I can sign up with my Mastodon account. I already have one, @ArchieBAntlers , and apparently there's some way to post from this account into a kdin magazine, or follow kdin mags from my Mastodon account, but I can't work out how that works.
Can someone help me out? I want to take full advantage of ActivityPub and the fediverse, and if not having to juggle multiple accounts is part of that, then I wanna make sure I'm doing it right.
And yes, I am from the #RedditMigration
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Yeah, I guess I understand that it can't be the Mastodon "account", but I'm seeing active users on Kbin with activity who are from instances of other sites, like @JamesK for instance, who is on a Mastodon instance. How does that work?
I think that means there's at least one kbin.social account who follows that Mastodon account, or at least that those posts have been boosted by accounts followed by Kbin users. As a result, kbin.social would've generated a local profile for that person so you can see the posts of his that have federated here. Similar to how when you use Mastodon, you can see a version of accounts on other instances' profiles without leaving your own instance.
I have an account on mastodon, which I’m following from my kbin account so that I can see my mastodon feed and respond to articles from within this platform without having to switch apps. I could also do the reverse if I wished. This probably helps those mastodon articles be more visible to other users on kbin.social. Others are probably doing likewise.
I think that’s how it works anyway.
Can you potentially give a step-by-step guide on how you did this?
Go to search and put in your full mastodon address (eg @archiehasantlers @mastodon.social but without the space because I couldn’t figure out how to stop it auto formatting it into a link )
That should bring up your mastodon account as a user you can then click on and follow.