Yes, that is one of the features of being federated. Kbin and Lemmy and Mastadon (and others) can all federate with each other, so posts and comments are all shared. It doesn't really matter if you're on Kbin or Lemmy, you can see the same communities/magazines and comments for the most part, and interact regardless of which one you are currently logged in to.
Well, my understanding is that email is federated, and SMS text messages are federated, but it isn't easy to email a phone number, or send a text to someone's email. So I'm surprised that Kbin and Lemmy can talk to each other.
But I see someone else answered that Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol, ActivityPub. Now it's starting to make sense.
but it isn't easy to email a phone number,
Mildly off topic, and showing my age a bit on this one but it 100% is easy, as long as the telco in question supports it.
I used to be with Koodo up here in Canada (albeit this was years ago) and the ability to send/receive emails via your phone number was trivial. Literally could email 5555555555[AT]msg.koodomobile.com and it would be received, and when you reply the other side gets the email reply.
Whether companies still do this on the other hand, is the question (that no one asked lol).
Then wait until you find that you can follow Lemmy/kbin communities from Mastodon and comment on Lemmy/kbin posts from your Mastodon account 🤭
how do you do this?
Search for the user/community name you want.
Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol -- ActivityPub. I've found that the best way to think of it is to compare it to email. If I send you an email from my gmail account to your outlook account, it just works (well, mostly, email is a bit of a mess lol) even though the two email clients look vastly different from each other. ActivityPub (and federated protocols in general) are like email, but for twitter/reddit.
There are some different message types (it wouldn't make sense to present twitter-like content in the context of a threaded forum like Reddit), and not all instance types support all the different message types. I'm using kbin (via kbin.social) and I can see Mastodon content, but I'm not sure if Lemmy has that ability.
Not sure if that was helpful, and I hope that others come and fact check me, but that's my understanding of it.
Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. I didn't know they spoke the same underlying protocol.
For fun and experimentation, I'm answering you from my Kbin account. I feel like a kid in a candy store playing with this new technology. Maybe Reddit's suicide-by-greed is not entirely a bad thing.
What is really cool is that you can mix and match features, like if you follow a Mastodon user on Misskey and vice versa, the Mastodon user can see the Misskey users full 5000 character post, even though Mastodon is limited to 500 chars.
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~