I'm just wrapping my head around it myself.

From what I got Kbin is an instance of Lemmy and Lemmy part of the Fediverse. The Fediverce is made up of a bunch of different types of social platforms.

eg:
Microblogging: Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey
Blogging: Write.as, Read.as
Video hosting: Peertube
Audio hosting: Funkwhale
Image hosting: Pixelfed
Link aggregator: Lemmy

Instances are those platforms being hosted by a user. It's like their own personal reddit. They get to make their own rules and stuff. The cool thing is all the instances can talk to each other. And you can choose to communicate the other instances.

There's more to it but I don't really understand everything.

Watch this: https://savjee.be/videos/simply-explained/mastodon-and-fediverse-explained/

I don't necessarily have the best understanding either, but I'll give it a shot.

The fediverse is a federated universe, which means lots of servers can talk to each other (like a federation of people) instead of all being centralized in one company and their servers. It's like how email is a common way to talk to each other, even though there are different groups with different versions.

Lemmy is the Reddit like portion of the fediverse. There are other parts, such as Mastodon, which is like Twitter. These can talk to each other a bit too, but right now they mostly talk within themselves.

Servers like vbin, sh.itjust.works, Lemmy world, Lemmy.ml, and many others are computers that store the information on Lemmy. They keep track of how many upvotes, text, links, and sometimes content hosting. But because there are a lot of them, and anyone can easily make their own, it's harder for a company like Reddit to just ruin it all for profit.

@s804 it's a cool protocol that many platforms use in order to allow any user on them to communicate with each other. Kbin is one of them. Friendica is another one. Hello from Friendica!

Disregard what I said, I didn't really see which magazine I was in. Basically it is a term describing multiple social media platforms, with various use cases, that can talk with each other using ActivityPub - a web protocol (kind of a language in layman terms) that allows them to do it.

• Here's an image showing you how that would look like (And here's the source of it. It has a really simple, but comprehensive explanation).
• A great website if you want to learn more and discover more platforms in this regard is this one.

As I said in the strikethrough text above, I am on such a platform myself. Hello from Friendica! 😁

Once upon a time, people thought that it would be fun to have a place to learn and play and talk together, and the more people that came, the better they would all learn from each other. So they got together and built this place in one fixed spot. And they DID learn from each other, and it was fun and amazing. But some people were greedy and wanted to control all of it so that they could feel like they were better than everyone else. These greedy people forced the people to give them more and more money to be able to use the spot. The bad guys would treat the people who wanted to have fun badly, and use information about them against them. This made people sad.

Then one day, somebody said, "Hey, why can't we just have a bunch of little spots, so that nobody can hold us hostage?"

But the other people were afraid they wouldn't be able to play with some of their friends or learn from other people if everybody was separated. Until some people came up with the idea that all these small communities could agree to share everything they were doing with each other, small spot to small spot. Nobody owned all the spots now, and people were free to choose spots that were more convenient for them, without having to be afraid that others wouldn't be there, because all the small spots still made one big spot!

And that dear, is basically the fediverse in a nutshell. Now go to sleep, you have a big day tomorrow. tuck tuck

Do 5 year olds have email? Because it's kind of like that. You have an email address "[email protected]" and you can send a message to "[email protected]". You don't both have to be on Gmail.

Well fediverse apps are kind of like this. Imagine lots of little reddits with their own communities and user bases.

You are [email protected]. You can talk to [email protected]. Same goes for magazines/communities (subreddits). If you want to join a magazine on another server, you can do that like @technology (notice the leading @ symbol which tells Kbin that it's a magazine and not a user).

This is what is most important for the average user to understand about the fediverse. There is a ton more than this like interoperability with different apps that aren't thread based like Kbin and Lemmy like Mastodon but that's a different discussion.

Hope this helps. Beautifully illustrated:

https://vis.social/@janeadams/110550051059894412