Lately I often read about kbin.social being similar to lemmy but more accessible. So I created an account there to check it out. My experience so far is a little mixed. From kbin I can access all Lemmy posts, although I find the interface less intuitive to join new communities. So from the kbin side it feels like an other Lemmy instance.
But when searching for kbin from this Lemmy Account, I do not find much. I feel like I am missing some basic concept, that makes it pretty clear. Why this is such a one way experience.
So now I am wondering: How does this work, what are the difference, what do both sites have in common?
They can make it so they can request community lists from servers they’re actively connecting to, but because of the decentralized nature of things, servers are not automatically connected to other servers. And I don’t believe a server even needs to be directly connected to another at all to receive posts and comments from users there if they’re routed through a community on a server it is following.
Spinning up a Fediverse server does not inform any other server that it exists, any more than it informs Etsy that it exists.
Not by itself but posting from it does. Lemmy.ml knows about hundreds of small instances because we post from them. :)