this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
52 points (96.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43138 readers
1245 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They ARE different sites, but they're federated. Basically, sites on the Fediverse (the nickname for the group of sites which share this functionality) can communicate. So, for example, Mastadon, Lemmy and kbin are all on the Fediverse, so they can communicate (when sites on the Fediverse are able to communicate, people say they are "federated").
Let me give you an example!
Say you're on Mastadon and you post something. That post will be visible to users on Lemmy and kbin, and people from Lemmy and kbin can comment and interact with it (since they all share the same protocol). Lemmy / kbin users will not have the 400 character limit Mastadon has, but they will still be able to interact.
Same thing if you make a post on Lemmy - on the whole, the Fediverse will be able to see your posts. Same with your comment here (Lemmy users can see it. For an example of a comment from another site, check out Stux's comment below - they are from Mastadon)
They are all distinct apps with distinct features, they just can communicate with each other. Imagine it like Twitter and Facebook could see each others' posts.
Now, some instances of Lemmy and kbin (basically, some servers of them) are blocked from federation with others on the Fediverse (aka, recently Beehaw - a Lemmy instance - blocked another Lemmy instance) but that is on a per-instance basis.
I was asking myself this just a few minutes before I saw your comment.
Thank you for this great explanation.
If I understood correctly, we don't need to have an account on each of these applications (kbin, Lemmy, mastodon) to be able to interact with their content.
However, they each have their own set of features and their own way to interact with the content. So Lemmy acts a bit like Reddit with up/down votes and discussion threads with comment depth, while Mastodon acts more like Twitter. I wonder how these content properties are set and managed by the different apps.