Not quite. Snowflake, just like every other bridge, is one step before. Broadly speaking, blocked user connects to snowflake-proxy --> snowflake-proxy forwards blocked user's traffic to an entry node. And that's about it.
sounds like it turns your computer into a tor exit node?
Not at all. Snowflake belongs to the family of pluggable transports, and offers a connection to an entry node in the Tor Network. Just like a traditional bridge, with the advantage that the higher number of individual, constantly moving IP's makes blocking them by oppressive regimes more difficult.
It uses WebRTC to disguise the traffic as a real time peer to peer communication, like video/voice call.
To add to the OP, if on linux or macOS, you may want to consider running a standalone proxy. Contrary to the browser extension it allows more than one connection at the same time and is more beneficial to the tor network all around.
Setting up is more than trivial following the instructions linked above, meanwhile snowflake got packaged for Debian, Ubuntu and a few others as well.
For macOS users there's is a homebrew package available.
Nah, you're good. For unknown reasons federation between kbin and lemmy.ml in particular is just fundamentally broken right now. There is some talk about this on lemmy.ml , there are a couple of threads about this topic on kbin as well somewhere, the most popular here.
Essence: Lots of speculation, nobody knows for sure, participation on lemmy.ml hosted discussions from kbin seems to be impossible right now (I tried, to no avail), federation between kbin and other lemmy instances does not seem to be impacted to the same extent, if at all?