Jonamerica

I had to play around with it a bit to figure out how this is working. Basically, if you post to a Magazine’s “microblog” it uses the Magazine name as a hashtag. See: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/p/433361. Paste that link in your Mastodon client and you’ll see the #kbinMeta hashtag. So, if you want to follow the Kbin Tech magazine you’d have to follow the #tech hashtag in Mastodon. If you look at that Magazine you’ll see posts there from Mastodon servers. Those are posts with the #tech hashtag. Posts that don’t have a hashtag end up in the Random magazine.

If you dive into the technology behind it all you start to see that all of these different platforms are designed to show the same content in different ways. They’re all based on the ActivityStreams protocol: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/.

Take the image object. If you post an image to Mastodon you see the text that was posted with that picture then the picture. If you look at the same picture in Pixelfed (similar to Instagram), you’ll see the image first and displayed prominently, since it’s the focus, followed by the text. In Lemmy or Kbin you’ll see a small thumbnail that you can then expand to see the full image. Same image object type, different ways of displaying it.

I guess the point is, depending on what your interests are (microblogging, sharing links, sharing photos, etc) you pick the platform that most suites your need. Or, have multiple accounts for posting different content.

Your home feed can default to “All,” which shows content from all communities across all federated instances (not just Kbin and Lemmy) or it can default to Subscribed, which shows content only from communities you’re subscribed to. Lemmy has a third option called “Local” which shows content from all local communities. Turning off federation for yourself in Kbin is similar to the local option in Lemmy, but allows you to still switch between All and Subscribed (ie, all local or subscribed local). Lemmy doesn’t currently offer a “local subscribed” view.

The hamburger menu next to your name allows you to toggle between Subscribed and All. In the dropdown menu when you hover over your name, under Settings, you can select your default view (Subscribed vs All).

My personal preference is to default to subscribed and see content from across the Fediverse that I choose to see. This way I’m not missing out on any communities or magazines on federated instances that interest me. I sometimes switch to All with the Commented sort to see what the current zeitgeist is (where are the biggest conversations happening). I don’t see much need to de-federate my view entirely since I can block communities/magazines, or entire domains, which means even under All I’m not bothered by content that I find annoying, offensive, etc.