JohannesOliver
That is not a dumb question.
kbin is it’s own thing, originally it couldn’t talk to Lemmy. It can also have its own instances. Today it can talk to Lemmy and Mastodon and should be able to talk to anything else that talks to them. It also has its own communities, and people on Lemmy can access those as if it were another Lemmy instance.
This has to be the first time I’ve seen someone praising reddit search, as opposed to a search engine.
Try changing the type to what you’re looking for. By default it will show all. Otherwise I’m not too sure what the issue is, if I search “brining up Reddit” this post is the result.
Joining is immediate, where some Lemmy instances require manual approval even now.
The main page comes off as more approachable and familiar. They also have a ton of local communities (or “Magazines”) so people can do a lot even without the Federation. I find the Microblog stuff somewhat confusing, I think because it doesn’t have much of a UI built around it so it is less familiar than Mastodon. It is fairly centralized though, in the sense that there aren’t that many kbin instances out there.
There was some discussion just before the Reddit influx, actually: https://lemmy.ml/post/1167199 Edit: Also read through the history of Lemmy for some info on the motivations. I have no problem with the admins of their instance running it however they want, and they made a really cool project and I appreciate that for the most part they do not have a problem with people who disagree with them. I think people should think twice before re-creating all of their favorite reddit subs on that instance though.