Lately I often read about kbin.social being similar to lemmy but more accessible. So I created an account there to check it out. My experience so far is a little mixed. From kbin I can access all Lemmy posts, although I find the interface less intuitive to join new communities. So from the kbin side it feels like an other Lemmy instance.
But when searching for kbin from this Lemmy Account, I do not find much. I feel like I am missing some basic concept, that makes it pretty clear. Why this is such a one way experience.
So now I am wondering: How does this work, what are the difference, what do both sites have in common?
Is there a reason why instances couldn’t just index and show all the communities from other federated instances?
Right now you have to do this to add a community from another instance:
- Visit it, look in communities, copy the link to the community
- Go back to the instance you were, paste link into search box and hit enter, then click the link, open sidebar, and click subscribe.
I don’t see why instances couldn’t just have an index over communities on all federated instances, so it’s a one click action to subscribe to any community in the entire Lemmy fediverse.
If this was implemented it would lower the bar for new users enormously, and encourage a lot more cross instance subscriptions.
Word is Lemmy and kbin are working to make the process more automated, so if you click a link to a community/magazine your instance want aware of it’ll start aggregation without having to manually do the search. Downside of going with a free, open source, decentralized solution is there aren’t a bunch of devs dedicated to updating the platforms for a living, so features will roll out slower.
How would one instance know that I set up a new instance without a central service?
