Lemmy is more of a Reddit alternative, where you have the focus on communities/categories (similar to “subreddits”) to which you can subscribe to, while Mastodon is more a Twitter alternative, focusing on users to follow.

Kbin is actually slightly special.

It is also running on the Fediverse network, but can communicate with multiple other services. Meaning, it can show you content from all Lemmy instances (called Threads) and content from Mastodon (called Microblog). You can see this thread there as well.

By using Kbin, you have access to both worlds, Lemmy and Mastodon. In addition, it supports even more of the so-called “ActivityPub” services, like Pleroma or Peertube.

While I love the implementation of Kbin, it still has small hiccups here and there - it feels less reliable/stable. Some content isn’t fully updated, like this post missing most of the comments at the time I posted this. They even warn you about it: “The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.”

I had the best experience so far by using a Lemmy instance for Lemmy and a Mastodon instance for Mastodon. Waiting for Kbin to be more mature.

Personally, I’m sticking to Lemmy and Mastodon for now. I like things seperated. Heck, I even have 3 different Mastodon accounts for different purposes.

I wasn’t a fan wel YT and insta started doing short videos alla TikTok. I wasn’t a fan of stories in my chat app. Etc etc.

Now I quit using most conventional SNS ages ago, and never used others. But I still feel the same way. Luckily, the good thing of decentralised stuff is that it uses the same protocol, and I can still interact with people who do want everything in one place and use kbin while I don’t have to.

They all talk to each other.

From my mastodon account i can:

• follow sublemmys
• follow lemmy users
• comment on lemmy posts
• comment on lemmy comments
• share lemmy posts
• share lemmy comments

From my lemmy account i can:

• follow mastodon users
• comment on mastodon users posts
• comment on mastodon users comments
• crosspost mastodon users posts to sublemmys

While i have never used kbin i have no doubt that it can do everything listed above.

Really the fediverse is a “choose your own interface” kinda place. Do you understand reddit UI best? Use lemmy. Does twitter UI make sense to you? Use mastodon. Do you like both? Use both for different reasons. Either way you can interact with anyone, using anything, anywhere that uses activitypub and anyone, from anywhere, using anything supporting activitypub can interact with you. That is the whole point. Get rid of the silo social media so you never have to lose your social graph again because you moved to a new service they are not on

I’m also a bit confused. Personally, I’m using Lemmy because it’s been around for longer. Kbin seems really nice in the UI/UX department, but to be honest I’m not a fan of its tech stack.

This is the beauty of the fediverse. With open protocols I believe that there’s going to be interoperability between whichever platform you choose.

• Basically, Mastodon is a microblogging platform which makes it can be alternative to Twitter or Tumblr.
• Lemmy is a social news aggregator which makes it alternative to Reddit or Digg.
• I haven’t used kbin, but it describes itself as both. So if you like to have both the features of microblogging and content aggregators at the same platform, go try it. Kbin can do this because it and the former two uses ActivityPub, aka they are in the Fediverse so you can see and follow content from each other’s platforms, just presented in the format of the platform you’re in (imagine Twitter posts in your Instagram feed).

I started with Mastodon and I’m new here on Lemmy. I think Reddit alternatives are pretty straightforward in the Fediverse. I’m here at Lemmy because it’s the most obvious what I came for with Reddit.
Meanwhile, Twitter alternatives here are a can of worms. There’s Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma, Gnusocial, etc. and all of their individual forks, competing with how much “micro” or how much “blogging” each have. Luckily, with Activitypub, content are shared with each other.