I migrated from reddit like a lot of folks. I’m using kbin.social, but it seems I can also see posts from people at places like lemmy.world. How many different instances are there? How does the federated model work? So far I like what I see, but I’m also just trying to understand how things are integrated here.
Instances are like smaller Reddits. Communities (lemmy) and magazines (kbin) are like subs. You can subscribe and participate in any c/ or m/ as long as their instance is federated with yours.
To add to the fun, we can also interact with users on Mastodon (similar to Twitter), Pixelfed (like Instagram), or any other ActivityPub-enabled instance that federated with us.
To my mind, a better analogy is email. It doesn’t matter which platform (provider) you use, you can interact with anyone on almost any other email platform. Make sense?
This was a great explanation, thank you.