I see kbin.social mentioned here and there where lemmy is discussed. How are those two related? Are they linked up, or are those completely separate communities?
They both operate on the same protocol called ActivityPub. So that mean it is possible for Lemmy users to interact with Kbin communities (or magazines, as they call them) and for Kbin users to interact with our communities.
Technically it’s also possible for Mastodon (since that also uses ActivityPub) user’s to reply to posts here… It’s not very user friendly, but it is possible.
Hello from a kbin instance
Reply from lemmy.world
Hello from Lemmy!
It’s just another instance, but one that supports microblogging and some slightly different features. The fediverse is made out of instances.
Instances mainly affect where your data is physically stored (every instance has their own server) and what content moderators of your instance have decided to block (for example, they could decide to block content from a neo-nazi instance). You would still have access to all content from pretty much all other instances.
Other examples of Lemmy instances are beehaw.org, lemmy.blahaj.zone, lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, etc. You have a more exhaustive list at https://join-lemmy.org/instances
