I migrated from reddit like a lot of folks. I’m using kbin.social, but it seems I can also see posts from people at places like lemmy.world. How many different instances are there? How does the federated model work? So far I like what I see, but I’m also just trying to understand how things are integrated here.
Instances are like Reddit, Twitter, instagram, etc. Each instance has certain rules that may vary from the parent they forked from (see beehaw vs Lemmy.ml). Those instances will then have a structure like subreddits, posts, comments, etc.
Lemmy is similar to Reddit. Communities (c/*) are subreddits
Mastodon is similar to twitter. Microblogs are tweets.
Kbin combines Lemmy and Mastodon.