When I visit kbin.social, I see new posts regularly. On other servers posts stay on the frontpage for multiple days. This is also true if I switch their sorting to “hot”. So that is probably not the difference.
What is kbin.social doing differently?
When I visit kbin.social, I see new posts regularly. On other servers posts stay on the frontpage for multiple days. This is also true if I switch their sorting to “hot”. So that is probably not the difference.
What is kbin.social doing differently?
Wow did not know that. So how can it interact with the lemmy instances if it’s not running lemmy software?
It’s part of the fediverse, things like mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, and kbin can communicate with each other because they all use activitypub. It’s a fun rabbit hole to explore if you have time
Because they use the same protocol: ActivityPub
For example, E-Mail gets send over the protocols pop3, smtp, imap. It doesn’t matter if you use Outlook or Gmail for Android or whatever email program. They still send data to each other using these protocols. Therefor both know what to do with the information exchanged.
There is software that is completely different from Lemmy and Kbin which can still interact via the ActiviyPub protocol. For example Mastodon for Twitter-like mini blogs. Or PeerTube which is a video platform. Pixelfeed is an image sharing platform similar to Instagram and the like. But since they all use AcitvityPub you can interact, comment, vote etc. on these images and videos or mastodon posts here on Kbin or on Lemmy.
In theory this sounds great. But obviously the different software needs to have the backend and the UI to support these features.
To make it even more difficult to implement, all these different installations are spread over many different servers (= federation). Which all can have differences in their software again and different speed and rules about how often they synchronize their data, etc.
That’s the magic of ActivityPub! It’s the protocol that most of the fediverse is built on, and it lets users from completely different fediverse platforms share posts with each other. It’s the special sauce that lets Mastodon, Lemmy, and kbin (and more!) work together
The ActivityPub protocol! It’s how all these platforms talk to each other.
Via the ActivityPub protocol that fediverse software uses :)
Pretty cool stuff!
Kbin can also directly interact with Mastodon users and toots because of this. Kbin magazines can natively contain both “threads” from Kbin and Lemmy, and microblog “posts” from Kbin and Mastodon. (And other software depending how they map these features.)