ELI5? McDonald’s and Burger King. One has a Big Mac, the other a Whopper. One has red and yellow, the other red and blue. Either way, you’re getting a burger.

Oh, they’re also right next to each other so you can wave to the people in Burger King from McDonald’s and vice versa. Now everyone is enjoying burgers together.

It is the difference between nginx and apache: two pieces of software that do basically the same thing. With the exception of some naming conventions and UI differences, they are the same and both participate in the community in the same way.

Effectively just two different methods to access the Fediverse. They each have different thought processes on how to do that, and both are at different stages in their development with kbin being the newest of the two.

I’m watching kbin’s development as I really like its intended ability to interface directly with say Mastodon, but as its stands it’s not quite their yet imo.

Okay, so think of every website that is part of the “Fediverse” (aka uses “ActivityPub”) as just being different ways to display the exact same data. Sometimes their data works really well between two of them and sometimes it’s a bit more awkward. Lemmy and Kbin are both trying to imitate the “forum-style” UI that Reddit uses, so they integrate really well with each other. Same data, slightly different UI. Mastodon, on the other hand is imitating Twitter. So trying to read Mastodon in Lemmy is like trying to read a Twitter feed as Reddit threads. It’s messier. Kbin seems to be trying to find a way to better display Mastodon-style threads within their UI. Otherwise, I think the big picture way to understand the difference is just that it’s a matter of UI and which one you prefer more.

Lemmy and kbin are two different forum software that can be installed and run on servers. Because both use the ActivityPub protocol, the content between them can be shared. So, a Lemmy user will be able to see content from a server running kbin, using Lemmy.