Can I subscribe to kbin from lemmy as well? It’s kind of crazy to think about. 😂

That’s the point of the Fediverse. Think of it like a contract. There’s rules on how data should be formatted, on what you can or cannot do, but what you actually do is up to you.

You can choose to participate through a Lemmy instance, you can use Kbin, some obscure tool connected to the Fediverse or you can even build your own thing that connects to it!

And nobody really “owns” it. It’s all about agreed conventions and community contracts. Anyone can adhere to the contract and build their own thing. The way it works is amazingly beautiful, to be fair.

You’re on the Beehaw instance, like me, so you would be able to interact with that specific federated community at https://beehaw.org/c/stallmanwasright@lemmy.ml.

If it helps you mentally decode the meaning of that URL, the community (the /c/ part of the URL) is named stallmanwasright, it’s hosted on lemmy.ml, and you interact with it through beehaw.org, which is where your account is that lets you subscribe, comment, etc.

You can decode the other URL /u/noodlejetski@masto.ai gave you the same way. The community they sent is named kbinmeta, is hosted on kbin.social, and accessed through beehaw.org. Once you understand how it works, it’s pretty simple.

Yes. You could somewhat see it as a combination between e-mail and Reddit.

When you want to send an e-mail to me, it doesn’t matter what e-mail provider you or I use. I could be using username@outlook.com and you could be using username@gmail.com or even some self-hosted, custom instance like user@name.com. It doesn’t matter, all those accounts and e-mail servers can interact with each other.

Similarly with Lemmy, you can subscribe and interact with communities on other instances with your Beehaw account. They are compatible with each other. But instead of e-mail data, they exchange Lemmy data. Anyone can join an excising Lemmy instance/server or even host their own instance if they wanted too.