Chat

You should just be able to search for the community using jerboas search. Example: I searched "technology" and it gave me back a handful of different communities from different instances all with "technology" in the name. Then you should be able to just tap the one you want and hit subscribe.

Thank you so much!

lemmy, kbin and mastodon are federated but you can't log into each app with an account from another platform. You can post to lemmy from your mastodon server, but not log into beehaw.org.

@kryostar Hello from Mastodon! You can follow users/communities on Lemmy from Mastodon like any other Fediverse user and it'll boost all their posts into your feed. Then you can interact normally from Mastodon.

@[email protected] @unsunny Ok i figured it out. It's a bit clunky, BUT IT IS POSSIBLE! I didn't even know! Now to see if i can view this on lemmy.

@marsxyz
@unsunny
You can view and even comment on lemmy/kbin posts from mastodon, like I'm doing right now

It's not as good a way to view forum based content though imho

I know people have said mastodon is like twitter, but what's kbin? Do I want all three?

Long winded explanation but hopefully it clears a few things up...

There is a protocol that allows two or more things to talk to each other. That is called ActivityPub and things that speak that protocol can work together. The things in this case are the servers which you register your account with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

You can have two different things (kbin and a Lemmy instance) and they can work together despite being different. They are differently written programs in different programming languages. The ActivityPub federation thing allows your Lemmy instance to ask to be sent all posts and comments from another server "just to have" as a local copy which you can then read on your server. If you comment, vote, or post on your server's "local copy" then your server sends that update back to the original server so they can update their records.

The content being downloaded from a remote server is like 1 person looking at everything over there. At that point, you and everyone else on your server can look at your local copy which is quick (if your server is not overloaded). The remote server can better handle lots of users from where you are at because your server is taking on the "user interaction load". This way, the user load is distributed to remote servers where the users do their interactions and the smaller "like 1 person" transactions are sent along when necessary.

The way things work on the Lemmy side is that you can see other communities by using the search function or by clicking on the communities button and clicking on all. You will see all communities that your server "knows about" (including communities hosted on this specific server). It automatically downloads all content from remote servers that it "knows about" (and it does so frequently) but that is driven by you first asking the server to get things from a specific server if necessary.

You can ask for things by searching for a specific address starting with a ! character. Wait a few moments and search again and you should be able to see that the content was retrieved for you. (You can search by a more granular term like the server address itself if necessary.) At that point, you can interact with that community in expected ways (like subscribing to that community to see updates from them).

The link you need is on the right side of any community page you view. Examples are [email protected] and [email protected]

Once everything is set up and working, the server you log in to will automatically gather posts and comments from "the fediverse", show it on your screen, and send along any comments or votes you make back to "the fediverse" for others to see.

That all being said... kbin is a bit overloaded at the moment and is not quite sending updates to other servers. When they have that sorted, you should be able to interact with them. Refer to the following post from chaorace for more information.

https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/67263

@[email protected] @[email protected] kbin isn't a lemmy instance, it's a lemmy "competitor"

kbin is a software you can install on your server just like you can install lemmy, or mastodon, or pixelfed, etc...

if you want to interact with a post/profile/community/... on another instance, the usual way is to just take the link to the post, and paste it into your instance's search bar. this'll bring up the post in your instance where you're logged in!

that's what i just did with your comment: i don't use either lemmy or kbin on my instance, but i saw your comment on beehaw, so i copied the link, pasted it in my akkoma search bar, and was able to reply to the post, even though my instance doesn't even have support for user groups/communities

kbin in a separate software from lemmy. The same way that Mastodon is different but still federated.

@[email protected] @[email protected] to add onto what was said, the cool thing about the fediverse is that it's all interoperable:
i am currently replying from my own self-hosted akkoma instance. this is more of a twitter-like microblogging software, that i'm running on a server i rent with a few friends. with it, i can't really browse lemmy/kbin communities yet, because akkoma doesn't yet have support for those, but i can reply and read content from users, and i believe even follow communities! and i can also follow video creators on peertube, or on the instagram-like pixelfed, whichever instance they use, because it's all the same protocol, so i don't have to sign up there :)

There are some duplicate communities (e.g. cats@instance1 and cats@instance2 to use your example) but you can subscribe to and interact with either/both communities without leaving your chosen instance - you don't need to make multiple accounts.