this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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From an end user point of view, there's not much difference other than the UI (and because of differing APIs, different third party apps too). It's fully interoperable with Lemmy (and Mastodon).
Behind the scenes on the server, though, it's a completely different piece of software.
Can you subscribe to kbin communities with a user made on a lemmy instance and post, and the other way around? I was under the impression that kbin and lemmy instances don't really mix that well. But maybe that's just because the clients we have right now are limited.
You can, yep. You can skidaddle over to kbin.social and give it a go.
The important thing to remember is that all of the stuff that you do with your account (subscribing, posting, commenting etc.) is actually done by the server your account is on. The way you "interact" with users/content on other servers is that once you've "done something" on your server, it then let's other servers know about it (via federation).
So if you're a Lemmy user and say "I want to subscribe to tech@kbin.social", your Lemmy server will go away and pull down all the info for that community from kbin.social and start displaying it in your feed. If you create a post on that community, your Lemmy server will send a message to kbin.social containing all the info it needs to create the post.
Lemmy and kbin fully federate together, so all this works just the same as kbin-to-kbin or Lemmy-to-Lemmy. As also mentioned, kbin also has "microblogging" (Twitter-like posting) as well as Reddit-like thread posting, and fully federates with Mastodon in the same way.