Boost For Lemmy is happening

Yeah, I never took it as preferential treatment or anything. Part of it is just that I used Boost for Reddit, so a part of me wants thinks it would be cool to continue to support them. I'll probably just stick here though. I'm sure eventually someone will make an app.

Long post/response incoming so apologies in advance (tl;dr is near the bottom in bold).

You are correct; Think of it like emails. Particularly the @outlook vs @gmail vs @yahoo, except with @lemmy and @kbin.

You can have a JohnJacob372@lemmy and a JohnJacob372@kbin and it be two separate people with the same username, but different "instances" just like email addresses.

The point is though, that everything that's part of the "fediverse" (Lemmy and Kbin are two of the biggest but there also exist others like Fedia.io) is connected in a way that if you're on one, you can see posts from the others. Ex: If JohnJacob372@lemmy posts an article on Lemmy, it'll show up on your kbin feed/frontpage and you can comment on it along with the lemmy folks.

You can tell where it originated from because it'll say next to the username and magazine (magazine is what you might call a subreddit, but again, you can have same named subs as well, one on Kbin and one on Lemmy). Ex: [email protected] 2 hours ago to [email protected].

If you don't see the @ part after the name or magazine, it means it was posted by someone on your same instance (otherwise it would be "redundant" to say "JohnJacob372 from your neighborhood on Main Street just posted a flyer in your neighborhood on Main Street" when you can just say "JohnJacob372 posted a flyer on Main Street").

So recap (tl;dr):
Instance = Platform (like Lemmy and Kbin)
Magazine = Subreddit
Username@InstanceA can post on Subreddit@InstanceA, and Anyone@InstanceA can read posts on AnySubreddit@AnyInstance (so long as the instance is "federated" i.e. part of the Fediverse Network like Lemmy and Kbin).

Hopefully that helps. You can stop here if you don't want to be confused more, but I will say this:

It may be beneficial, at least in the early days, to have an account on different instances. Mainly because each instance is ran on personal servers by individuals which can have a lot of problems, especially when they are overloaded (like during large migrations from Reddit to here). Having an account on another Instance is like having another account on another Server that can still access the same posts, but because it's a different server, it might be up and running while the other is down for maintenance.

Ideally, apps will eventually be able to switch between instances automatically, but for now, it's easier for app developers to focus on one instance at a time which is why you see different apps for Lemmy and Kbin. This is where my own understanding could be fuzzy because afaik you should still be able to access posts from both (all) instances, it's just that you would need to have an account on the instance/server that app is based on. So an app for Lemmy means you would need to have a Lemmy account, but you should still be able to access/read content posted on Kbin. I think. I could be wrong and you can only see/access content on Lemmy if that's the case. But even then, it won't be forever. These things take time but it's definitely an achievable goal.

Novice explanation (I'm the novice, not an expert dumbing it down). The Fediverse includes all platforms that operate on the ActivityPub protocol. That means that different platforms can be part of the fediverse. Mastodon is the biggest fediverse platform I'm aware of. It's a lot like Twitter structurally. Even though Kbin looks like reddit and Mastodon looks like Twitter, they are all part of the fediverse because their built on ActivityPub. The way these platforms are built, anyone can make their own mastodon or Kbin instance (server) and Federate with other instances. Even though Kbin and Mastodon are pretty different, they can still federate with and talk to eachother.

Kbin and Lemmy are different software platforms that were both built to be a lot like reddit. They might even be hard to distinguish. They are written in different programming languages, so Kbin isn't just another instance of Lemmy run by a different person, it's a wholly seperate software project. However, they can communicate with eachother through ActivityPub. Since they look so similar to users, they almost look like they are just different instances to eachother, but under the hood it's more like how Kbin can pull in microblogs from Mastodon.

Because Lemmy has been around a few years and Kbin only a couple of months, many developers are making Lemmy apps first. Since the software is made differently, an app made to work with Lemmy won't necessarily work out of the box if you try to login with a Kbin account. But I do think that longterm there may be some apps that support both.

I can't help but try to add my ELI5 explanation. It's like how Gmail and Yahoo are interchangeable but you can only use the Gmail app with Gmail accounts and to log into Yahoo you have to use the Yahoo app.

There are apps that support imap/pop that can do both but we don't have the equivalent of imap/pop for the fediverse yet (closest we have is several projects having mastodon compatible APIs but sometimes it's only partial, iirc pixelfed used to be usable from the mastodon app but it diverged too much)

"Interchangeable" isn't quite the right word, because they're different software with different features, but they share content, which is the most important part.

You can easily try both and choose the one you like better. Or if there's an app you want to use but it only supports one service, it's probably a good reason to choose that one. I might switch myself once sync for lemmy is ready.

That's right, but the apps will be specific to the platform. So you won't be able to log into an app made for lemmy with a kbin account, but you can interact with people on lemmy