I am new to the Fediverse. I vaguely understand how Lemmy instances broadcast content to each other, but I was surprised to find Lemmy communities on kbin. How does that work?

https://feddit.uk/post/101886

I am new to the Fediverse. I vaguely understand how Lemmy instances broadcast content to each other, but I was surprised to find Lemmy communities on kbin. How does that work? - Feddit UK

And it also seems that mastodon can also be “syndicated” to these other communities, and vice versa? Is that true? Are there limitations to any of this? Apologies if this is not the perfect place to ask this question. I’m a lost old man. :-)

All fediverse software (lemmy, kin, mastodon, etc) implements their own version of ActivityPub in slightly different ways. There are cases where the overlap is enough to cross over (lemmy communities and kbin magazines), and some where it doesn't work/is wonky (lemmy users can't follow mastodon users).

There's a more in depth write up here if you're curious: https://overengineer.dev/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later.html

You can follow Mastodon accounts from Lemmy and Kbin.
https://kbin.social/u/@[email protected]
https://lemmy.ml/u/[email protected]
Overview - Gargron - kbin.social

Explore Fediverse

Oh nice! How are you able to pull up mastodon users on Lemmy? I've never been able to get the search to work

I don't know so much about Lemmy. In kbin, you just search for the user address and it will show in the results.

That doesn't seem to be the case for Lemmy though and I don't know if Lemmy has any way to make search work this way, but you can always manually build the user profile URL in Lemmy the way I did: <lemmy_instance>/u/<user address>