Kbin and Lemmy are different software that have communities (magazines on Kbin) where people post content and have threaded discussions. Very much reddit-like.
There are many instances of both Kbin and Lemmy.
Kbin and Lemmy do federate, i.e. 'talk' to each other via the same protocol. This means you can see and interact with content regardless which of the two software an instance has chosen. It's not perfect, e.g. I believe some minor features are not compatible (yet) and I have experienced that federation doesn't always work, but hopefully this all becomes smoother when both mature.
I see some tourists wear one in Amsterdam. Very rarely a local, of which I always assume they're ill themselves or easily get ill (immunocompromised and what have you).
It's not just a personalized feed, it's also that the algorithms of commercial social media are created to keep you engaged for as long as possible, so you see more ads.
Turns out that people are more engaged with outrage than puppies, so the feed can easily become a super negative thing full of false information, which affects the person viewing and eventually the whole of society. E.g. I am certain that the fact that youtube's algorithm so easily takes you into the conspiracy territory has caused a lot of people to end up on the fringes of society, causing shit like storming of the Capitol.
How do you differentiate between a small instance where 10 votes would already be suspicious vs a large instance such as lemmy.world, where 10 would be normal?
I don't think instances publish how many users they have and it's not reliable anyway, since you can easily fudge those numbers.
I have the same problem with !amsterdam@kbin.social. Tried subscribing and posting from lemmy.ml, but I don't see posts here beyond the one I created (which btw didn't become visible at kbin.social, so it's not working both ways).
Edit: this morning I edited an existing post I made from lemmy.ml to kbin.social. The post showed up with its edit. A bit later I also saw a post from kbin.social show up in lemmy.ml, so I think interacting with content will at some point force federation if it was not working initially. YMMV
Imo the fediverse should not try to compete with the big commercial networks on their terms. It will be much healthier when it grows slow and steady with people who want to be here because it is the fediverse. A place of freedom and lack of controlling evil players who will use your data to control your behavior (to get more ad revenue or worse, to make you act against your best interests, such as happened on facebook with Cambridge Analytica).
We're not gonna win from big dollars and vested interests. Let's not play their game. Let them play their game and let us be a safe haven for anyone who is done with being a pawn in that game.
The fediverse is already a really nice place to be. You don't need 100s of millions of users to have the network effect that creates a successful platform. We've already reached that critical mass.
NLnet already sponsors the development of Lemmy. They donate money when certain roadmap items are achieved (which has slowed down due to the efforts to make Lemmy scale). NLnet sponsors organizations and people that contribute to an open information society.
Places like Lemmy are not just shit posting. Just look at the immense value of the content at reddit. Google became so useless when the blackout happened. LLMs like GPT4 are trained for a large part on this human generated content. It's absolutely vital that this information is not controlled by a handful large corporations as it is now. Federated social media could break this pattern and bring back a free and open internet.
Most importantly: Lemmy instances are not being run for profit. There is no need to make exorbitant amounts of money to pay shareholders. Right now it's enough to cover hosting costs, in the future you probably want to be able to pay a couple of people as well.
Commercial instances are not off the table, but I hope we can avoid it. If it happens, I hope it will not be about profiting directly from the users, but instead through e.g. professional services. Imagine a company that hosts instances for entities that are willing to pay (I see this especially in the microblogging/Mastodon space, where for instance governments want to run their own instance).
Yeah, I also seriously doubt there's a big conspiracy happening where ultra rich people are helping each other. Have you looked at those people? Most don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves.
Musk bought Twitter around the time he was fighting with this guy that had the private jet tracker. I think it's more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it's a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively. And once Twitter is dead, he'll discard it and move on to the next thing. Like a cat playing with its prey.
Same on Android. I'm running it on Firefox, but probably also works with Chrome.