Well, technically you will respond to a “copy” of the post. However, everything is federated (shared). So your comment (the “original” on kbin.social) will be a “copy” on the other server (for instance lemmy.world). So while technically speaking people could be responding to “copies” of comments/post, everything will be shared between servers.
To make it more clear (perhaps): I have my own instance/server (k.fe.derate.me) and I use my own link, website and interface to type this reply (not related to kbin.social). When I hit “send”, my reply will be stored on my instance. However, kbin.social will recieve a “message” from my instance that I replied. kbin.social will then save a “copy” of my reply on their instance/server and you will receive a notification that I replied. When you open your notifications and click on it you will see my reply, but it will be the local copy of kbin.social.
So I’m on kbin. And your comment can be described as
On kbin.social from k.fe.derate.me
And my reply when you see it would be
On k.fe.derate.me from kbin.social
everything is federated (shared)
hopefully. it’s early days so i dont think everything always makes it. unless i’m dumb. cause i’ve made posts to magazines on other servers and it seemed to never make it there. and could have been for any number of reasons. its the wild west right now.
That is true. Federation is broken on lemmy (due to an update and due to blocking (not defederating) by lemmy.ml) and kbin is in alpha/beta test so also not working 100% reliable. And then you have the massive surge of users which no one was prepared for so a lot of servers where running at max capacity and dropping or delaying updates.