Lemmy uses a rust back end which basically compiles to native code. By contrast, kbin uses a php back-end.
In my experience, that has a big effect on the speed of federation. My first brush with the fediverse was friendica which is php. It had a lot of really great features, but the one thing that I just couldn’t deal with was the slow speed of federation. My instances aren’t like lemmy.world or kbin.social, pretty much every message comes from somewhere else. The better federation works, the better my experience.
A lot of the original Lemmy instances are quite trigger happy. It’s one really nice thing about the new instances with new admins who block but still prefer not to unless it’s really necessary.
I believe it can be, but what I’ve found in general with respect to my fediverse journey is that pretty much everything is built for Linux. If you want to use windows, you’ll likely have to blaze a trail for yourself.
I had one windows PC in my server farm initially, but installed Linux after I realized most things I wanted to run really wanted me to be running Linux.
Lemmy can see kbin magazines. I’m on a lemmy instance right now.
kbin.social itself has had some federation issues in the past month, but I think that’s more growing pains of a new platform than anything inherent in the system itself.
I did grow up with forums. They key though is that communities are much weaker today despite many still having threaded conversations. Back then you’d get to know people because there were few enough people to know. Today when you have a subreddit with millions of users it doesn’t matter that there’s threads or not because due to sheer volume it’s all ephemeral.
privacy redirect on chrome based browsers lets you do the same for a number of different services too. Really nice to help enforce staying away from our big tech overlords.