I found out about it because of a hacker news comment discussing the Reddit drama. I'm pretty upset that I didn't discover it on Reddit. I assume any mention of Lemmy was marked as spam or was I just not browsing the right communities?
I still don't understand if I'm on Kbin or Lemmy. I have a Kbin login so this is Kbin right? But I can view subs/magazines/federations on lemmy? But not all of the content? And I can comment/interact with those Lemmyubs/magazines/federations if i'm on Kbin, but not with the same account if I go to Lemmy? WTF is going on.
you're on kbin, you can tell because your username ends in @kbin.social, which is a kbin instance. Instance is just another name for a server. Due to federation you can view and comment on threads from any other federated instance. You can also join maganzines (called communities on Lemmy, groups on mastadon, and subreddits on reddit) from any other federated instance as well. The only thing I don't think you can do is become a moderator on another instance. Note, the content is being brought to your kbin feed because we are federated, if you go to to the original instance you've left the website and thus won't be logged in.
Nah, this shit is confusing initially. Think of it like email. You're using gmail, but you can still see and participate in email threads sent by Outlook users. It's just that instead of emails, it's a threaded forum somewhat in the style of reddit.
In case the email analogy doesn't work for you, let me let me try to explain. You're on kbin, you can tell because your username ends in @kbin.social, which is a kbin instance. Instance is just another name for a server. Due to federation you can view and comment on threads from any other federated instance. You can also join maganzines (called communities on Lemmy, groups on mastadon, and subreddits on reddit) from any other federated instance as well. The only thing I don't think you can do is become a moderator on another instance. Note, the content is being brought to your kbin feed because we are federated, if you go to to the original instance you've left the website and thus won't be logged in. There's nothing to stop you from making another account with a Lemmy instance, but there's not really any reason to because you can see the same content.
In kbin's UI, on every thread you can click "more", then "copy url" to see what the origin of the thread is - if it shows another domain name like lemmy.ml then you know you are looking at a thread that originated on a different "fediverse instance". Likewise you can also look at the URL of a username to see where they are posting from.
Lemmy presents things a little bit differently from kbin, and when things are federated to different instances there's no guarantee we see exactly the same things as each other(voting stats, replies etc.) What we do get is roughly enough to have a discussion, though.
You don't. You are logged in to a kbin account but, just like if you were logged in to a lemmy account, you can read and post to the same threads and comments. Just like if you were logged in to your gmail account you can send an email to somebody with a hotmail account or another gmail account. Doesn't matter.
While you're on kbin, the servers share basically everything under the hood, so the distinction isn't that strong. Compared to Lemmy, you'd see a different interface and some features may differ, but the underlying content is basically the same whether you're on kbin or Lemmy. So despite being different products, it's basically one big community. The likes of Mastodon are technically in there too, but the threading structure of kbin and Lemmy means you'll mostly see those two products sharing content.
Though note that the specific site you're on does control things like the sorting of posts. What's hot for a kbin user might not be for a Lemmy user. Similarly, sites could hide or block some kinds of content if they want to. Eg, I think kbin probably did something to filter porn off the front page, cause I don't see porn anymore unless I look for it. Beehaw is another good example here. It's a Lemmy instance that decided to block the biggest other Lemmy servers to limit access to their communities.
TL;DR: same content, different interface for viewing and interacting with the content.