Moving to: m/AskMbin!

The important thing to understand is that kbin.social and a lemmy instance like lemmy.ml are federated but still different websites. Therefore the magazine /m/technology is different from the lemmy.ml community /c/technology. It's just that you can access lemmy.ml magazines from kbin.social and vice versa.

Across instances, magazines are not uniquely identified by their name, but by their address. The address of the kbin.social magazine /m/technology is [email protected], whereas the address of /c/technology on lemmy.ml is [email protected]. You can subscribe to both from kbin itself. If you're on kbin, just 'technology' is interpreted as [email protected]. So the magazine page for kbin magazines is kbin.social/m/magazineName and the page for magazines from other federated websites is kbin.social/m/magazineName@website.

/m/technology -> kbin.social/m/technology
/c/technology -> kbin.social/m/[email protected]

When I subscribe to /m/technology here on kbin, do I get to see /c/technology posts from lemmy and can interact with them from within kbin?

Not automatically, but they do use the same protocol. If you went to http://kbin.social/m/[email protected] (note that last part) it would show up fine as a new magazine to be added. I think once one person on kbin.social subs manually, it becomes populated and will show up in searches for new magazines, but I start to get a little fuzzy on the specifics. Still, you can participate in most lemmy instances with an extra step or two and without perfect subject-matter integration, but also without leaving your home kbin instance. Also, a site like lemmy.ml is just as distinct from lemmy.world as kbin.social is, the first two just run the same back-end software and have similar names.

Because the domain names are really part of the community's name, even if sites don't show them by default (in kbin, the default behavior is to show them when you hover over them), then similarly named communities can coexist, though they generally don't integrate either. There has been some noise from us Reddit refugees to make automagic multireddits from identically named communities, but that's not really what the original ActivityPub architects had in mind, so it may not be as simple as it sounds.

Also, If they're automatically federated, then how does it work with /m/askkbin and /c/asklemmy, both with different names.

Those two would just be two completely different mags for a kbin user, inefficient to consume maybe, but very simple. Think in terms of /r/funny and /r/humor.

Short answer: No they're separate and you'd need to sub to both to see both. You don't need a Lemmy account to sub to things from over here though, just need to search for the community address on Kbin side.

To my knowledge they're separate. For example I'm replying to this from Lemmy, and asklemmy is separate from askkbin. You can still follow communities/magazines from one another though