Still yet another article listing Reddit alternatives, but surprisingly this one mentions both Lemmy & Kbin

Damn! I cannot get that imagery out of my mind; it’s suddenly seared onto my minds eye.

Well done

You certainly paint quite a picture

Somebody who works at a company that produces articles like that mentioned how the sponsor of the list always goes at the top - hence why the next option works so hard to say that kbin is not as good as the original Lemmy - while everything else is placed there to make the original one look good.

Like, who wouldn't look fantastic when compared to 4chan!? :-P

Okay, yeah. There is the cesspool there too, but we’re comparing nuclear bombs to rotten apples here.

Lemmy is a community led content aggregator similar Reddit. Mastodon is a microblogging platform similar to twitter.

Kbin combines the functionality of both and federates with both. Think of it as twidder or rettit. Insert a smash up yourself.

Lemmy was created by a couple pro-China pro-Putin “communists” and one of them is full on genocide of Uyghurs is not happening because they do not consider them people.

Kbin was created by someone who wanted a place for friends.

Do with that information what you will.

This article is posted from me with a kbin account, on a kbin magazine:-). The true beauty of the fediverse is that you need not care - like if I had a gmail account and you had a yahoo one, you could still receive the message despite being on entirely different servers.

Various Lemmy instances are part of the fediverse, and run the Lemmy code (various scripting languages - Rust, Actic, Diesel, Infero & Typescript). Each admin can do whatever, like modify the sourcecode, mess with their personal databases, etc., which can lead to different Lemmy instances using different versions of the sourcecode, which happened a few weeks ago and led to problems connecting when a new version became incompatible with the old.

Kbin is not a Lemmy instance though - it is a completely different implementation built from the ground up, in PHP & PostgreSQL - but it still uses ActivityPub so it can share with Lemmy the same as any Lemmy instance could. Meta (Facebook) will similarly implement ActivityPub in some manner and so also be able to communicate across the Fediverse. (Also as people are saying, Kbin also has implementation to share with Mastodon too while the Lemmy code does not.)

Unless an individual Lemmy - or a Kbin - instance wants that to not happen, i.e. to defederate, which is a whole other matter.

So:

• instance = a particular machine (lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or beehaw or whatever);
• Lemmy = code, or Kbin = different code, running on that instance, affecting what/how/etc.;
• fediverse = everything that shares messages, like if one day a decade from now Reddit (may the spez have been fucked over MANY times before that day:-P) was forced to adopt ActivityPub and become a member in order to stay relevant, then it would become a part of it as well;
• defederate = a specific blocking of messages from one instance to another (not necessary 2-way)

So if you thought of yourself as a Lemming/Lemmon/whatever before reading this comment, it is probably better to start thinking of yourself in terms of being a fedizen now - a member of the wider fediverse. You always were, you just did not know that yet:-).

I'm talking to you from kbin.social right now.

It's like a lemmy but with some different features. Like, I can read and interact with mastodon users a bit from here as well.