Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt.
Is Lemmy buggy as heck? Absolutely.
But I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out. The front page feed and sort options are very similar to Reddit. Searching for same-instance communities is not too difficult. Posting, commenting, and voting are all quite intuitive. What’s the problem?
Kbin doesn’t have as much of this because it’s simplified quite a bit. It’s one reason why I recommend Kbin to newbies, because it gives you a giant “sign up” button immediately.
But to answer your question:
Instance: a server that hosts everything. You and I are on Kbin.social, which is an instance. Another Kbin instance is fedia.io. Kbin has relatively few instances. Lemmy has oodles (Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, etc.). Lemmy actively encourages people to spread out over many instances.
Magazine/Community: If you’re on Kbin, I’d hope you know what a Magazine is. Lemmy calls them Communities. Reddit called them Subreddits. They’re all basically the same - buckets for people to make posts about certain topics.
The fact that you have to explain signifies exactly what OP means - that it’s complicated. A good design, UI for example, don’t have to be explain. Things flows naturally.
I think I understand the terms you have explained, but I am still a little confused on viewing by “all”, when I view “all” am I seeing posts from every instance that is federated with the one I’m on or only the communities/magazines that users on my instance have visited before?
“All” shows every community/magazine that at least one person on your instance has subscribed to.
The different sort options sort then differently, of course.
I see, thank you! This makes the choice of instance when signing up more significant than I thought.
Yep, places with more people will have a wider range of communities in their “all” feed.
That said, the barrier to making an account isn’t too high. My first account was on Lemmy.ml back in 2020, shortly after Lemmy was created (I never stuck around and left pretty quickly).
Last month I realized I don’t trust Lemmy.ml, so I joined Beehaw.org.
Then I thought Beehaw.org was a little overzealous at times, so I came here to Kbin.social.
I’ve largely stuck to Kbin because I really like how it looks and feels, but I did make accounts on Lemmy.world, fedia.io, and sh.itjust.works as backups in case Kbin goes down.