Hello everyone! Long time redditor, first time poster to Lemmy.world. As I’m learning more about the Fediverse, I’m seeing there are several instances that seem to serve the same purpose. For example, Lemmy and Beehaw seem to be similar, yet they are still separate.
Are there any big differences or factors I should be looking for when browsing different instances? So far, it looks like the number of communities and rules are the biggest differences between instances.
Bonus question: are there any good sources for learning more about the Fediverse? I’ve found these links so far:
https://opensource.com/article/23/3/tour-the-fediverse - Gives a decent explanation of the Fediverse. https://fediverse.party/ - Provides a link to different Fediverse instances, not specific to Reddit replacements.
Lemmy is the software a lot of the Reddit style fediverse websites run on. Many of them include Lemmy in the name such as Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world, but others don’t include Lemmy in the name. Beehaw.org is another website that runs the Lemmy software, it just didn’t put Lemmy in its name. Beehaw does have an uncommon configuration since the down vote ability is disabled there, but it still is Lemmy at its core.
Kbin is a different software altogether so the kbin servers such as kbin.social and fedia.io have a different layout, terminology, and some different features than the Lemmy based servers, but Lemmy and Kbin both use the ActivityPub protocol to send and fetch data, so you can post between the two platforms as if they were on the same server. I am browsing this post and writing this reply from kbin.social.