Kbin is federated with a bunch of the lemmy servers as well. If you look at the address of the post it’s kbin/m(agazine)/lemmyworld@lemmy.world, so we’re seeing a post from the LemmyWorld community (called magazines on kbin) on the lemmy server https://lemmy.world/
I promise it makes sense after a while lol
edit: the users of lemmy can also see what we say over here on kbin because kbin and lemmy talk to each other. This post lives on that lemmy instance
So its like a decentralized thing that all goes back to… lemmy? I legit don’t understand.
TL;DR both of them speak the same language so both can call each other up and trade info back and forth. You can upvote/comment/whatever on either and it’ll appear on both sides without you having to do anything special.
It doesn’t all go back to lemmy, but lemmy and kbin speak the same language (ActivityPub) and can talk to each other (they are federated). Others in this thread have compared it to email where you might be on different services (gmail, yahoo, icloud) but they can still all understand messages coming from each other. The fediverse is similar, but instead of just sending a message to another site to put in your inbox like email, lemmy/kbin/mastodon/etc can ask each other for stuff on an external site and display it to you as if it was all coming from the same site.
In our case kbin calls up lemmy.world and asks for what everybody there is saying on some post. Lemmy.world tells kbin about all the comments and upvotes so kbin can plug it into the same style of page you see for everything else here. Even though it’s happening on a separate server and underlying platform, they still know how to exchange data
Alright, so…I cannot find the person that posted this explanation but I think it makes more sense than the ‘email analogy’.
Imagine the fediverse as a universe. Full of other solar systems and we are in the Kbin.social system
Now when we talk about Earth, we know it’s in our solar system but what if another solar system also has an Earth, then what? Well, then we’d make sure to say which system it comes from, like Earth@ProximaCenturi or Sun@AndromedaGalaxy.
Same thing applies when we talk about places here, for example c/memes. When we talk about our memes we don’t need any more info…it’s the memes in our ‘solar system’. But I want to talk about memes from the lemmy system and to do that I’d add the location info like memes@lemmy.world.
Tldr: instances are like other solar systems and magazines are like planets in those solar systems. We can hope in our ship and visit any other planet in the other solar systems
