Yeah you can subscribe to any lemmy or kbin community from any lemmy or kbin instance!

Somehow people should be made more aware of this. You need just one account and it does not matter where you create it as long as you can trust that the server stays up.

That isn’t 100%. Instances can be blocked from federating. For instance if you are on lemmy.world you are no longer getting beehive posts because beehive disabled federation with lemmy.world

I think kbin has the best interface and I am hoping they get “multireddits” implemented soon so you can combine communities from multiple servers into a single view

I've been wondering. What does defederation do exactly? Does it only block posting from the defederated instance or does it block both posting and browsing too?

Blocking interactions would be understandable but also blocking read-only subscriptions seem like a mistake.

It's like a traditional social media block but for whole servers. Basically it totally severs the federation between the instances, making it look to each other like they never existed.

That's unfortunate. Hurray for RSS I guess.

Is there a guide to do this for dummies? Subscribing is one thing, but is it possible to "comment" on another instance's community?

Edit: Figured out myself. It wasn't that difficult :) I agree with others that this needs to be mentioned more often. But, when I searched for "dotnet" in lemmy.world, it didn't return "https://kbin.social/m/dotnet" as one of the search results. Is this due to defederation? Is there a way to add a community using a unique identifier instead of searching for it?

You can search local communities, or all communities. If someone else has previously searched and found the remote community you're looking for, it'll appear immediately. If they haven't, you need to already know the url (or short alias) for that community, and search for that... And then it'll take a while to federate, and then anyone can find it with an easy search from there.

It's kind of complicated, but is only a problem for new instances and new communities. After everything is established, it'll be a lot easier.

I tried to search with the full URL and it didn't show up. That's why I thought it wasn't the way to do it. But I can now see it when I search for it. So, you are right, it takes some time.

Yeah, that's incredibly unintuitive, and I only know it works that way because I've seen a few people say it does.

I expect the software will continue to improve, though, so these rough edges will eventually be taken care of. I hope. :D

You can also follow Kbin Magazines and Lemmy Communities (subreddit) from Mastodon. They are Groups on Mastodon. I am not sure about posting a top level, but I can comment.

No you can't. If the community is hosted on an instance that doesn't federate with the one you have an account on, you can't interact with that community.

Most of the large subs I see in this list haven’t actually “moved”. These new sites linked have very little (if any) content and the subs themselves are still very active.

Some of them seem legit, but a majority of what I clicked seem like random people trying to ride the drama and make their own spin-offs.

They all interconnect. You can even send/get kbin/Lemmy content with mastodon! They all use the same decentralized ActivityPub protocol.

Technically true but incorrect in the real world. Several services already blocked federation between each other, like beehive and lemmy.world

So how do i follow a Kbin “magazine” in for example the Ivory/Mona client for Mastodon?

Is there any way to actually practically use kbin/lemmy from a mastodon account?

Finding a post using a kbin/lemmy server and then copying and pasting the url into mastodon in order to interact with it is not practical.

I have also seen a lot of people say they ended up subscribed in a way that resulted in getting all comments instead of only top level posts when they subscribed to communities, which is also not at all practical. Is there a way to subscribe to top level posts within a community?

There's someone working on this interesting project.[1] It's a Lemmy<->Reddit proxy that translates requests between the two APIs so you can use Reddit apps to browse Lemmy. If it gets some traction, it will be a great tool for helping new people coming from Reddit to settle in.

I think you [1] a link

Even though it's possible to subscribe across instances, I think it would make the most sense if there was a single UI that the user can configure like an RSS reader that would bring relevant content from those the user has subscribed to. The user could then read and comment from within the tool (using whichever account they choose).

There's a handful of apps that exist for phones, I use Jerboa at the moment. It's easy enough to get a feed of all subscribed communities, but subscribing is a bit of a pain every way I've tried, and most communities aren't active enough to get a good feed like you can with Reddit. Part of the problem is that most the popular instances of Lemmy are getting bombarded with traffic and availability isn't great. Just hitting subscribe doesn't always work, which is likely related to server health as many instances haven't let people log in or sign up periodically.

There's also some defederation issues, so you may need several accounts and then stich them all into one feed to truly get everything you want, but I've not attempted that.