Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I’m new to this whole fediverse thing and I don’t know if it works like it seems to.
So I have this kbin account, and I also have a Mastodon account. This one is the one I want to use, and theoretically I should be able to use it to communicate with the whole(ish) fediverse, right? But that doesn’t seem to be working.
Both my accounts follow one another. But when I post something on either account it doesn’t show up in the other account’s feed. Is it not working, or am I just misunderstanding something? Kbin definitely seems almost ideal for what I’m hoping to get out of this system (at least when there’s a better mobile experience) but if it doesn’t work like this than maybe not haha.
(And if a better mobile experience isn’t on the table anytime soon, what alternatives would y’all recommend? Subscribing to the magazines on something like Mastodon doesn’t work as well because the “account” you follow retweets every single post and comment.)
You may have slightly misunderstood the Fediverse.
Accounts are not shared between different systems. They’re not even shared between different instances of the same system.
What gets shared is the content, and the knowledge about other accounts.
So you can follow a Kbin user from Mastodon, or vice versa. A Mastodon user can boost (“retweet”) something posted by a Lemmy user, on Lemmy. A Kbin user can upvote (“favourite”) a post that’s on Mastodon. A Calckey user can reply to a Kbin post, and that reply appears on Kbin and Mastodon and everywhere else that the thread is visible. And so on.
But your actual account, i.e. your username & password and the profile associated with it, are firmly and permanently associated with the specific server you initially registered with.
And this is why we shouldn’t keep saying “it doesn’t matter which instance you sign up on” to newcomers.
I think the best approach would be to make a list of the most vibrant and general purpose instances, at least a few of them, and direct people to those. Once they figure it out, they’ll find their best fit anyway. If their initial experience is in a particularly slow or very niche instance, they might abandon the platform altogether due to the wrong impression they get.
That’s exactly what happened to me with mastodon because the first instance I signed up for was too niche and too small. It just felt dead. It was the same three or four people posting disjointed stuff and never interacting with each other by the looks of things. I figured it out in time but that was a bad first impression nonetheless.
They didn’t say they were trying to use one account to log into another site. They said they had accounts on both platforms, that the accounts were mutuals, and that they couldn’t see the content being shared.
This is likely due to the DDoS protections being in place.