I just boosted your comment by clicking boost. No idea what it does but you have a shiny (1) next to boost now.
I'm still learning this myself. So only speaking from limited experience.
But from what I understand, in the case of Lemmy, KBin, Mastodon, and a few others, they all use the ActivityPub network protocol and that is what essentially connects them all together.
I am only speculating, but I expect that there is some improvements needed in that protocol along with some standardization between dissimilar platforms to facilitate better visibility between those dissimilar platforms.
On the flip side, even Lemmy to Lemmy instances have issues showing communities from other lemmy instances. Which, leads me to suspect a problem either in configuration of the instances, or in the underlying protocol (ActivityPub).
Edit: from the kbinmeta magazine, here's more details on plans for the search feature here.
Pretty sure OP and others above are talking about from smart enabled media devices like Amazon firestick or google's equivalent chromecast, a hardware device you plugin to your tv, not the chromecast capability.
It has gaps in communities, and is not completely federated for all instances, but if you click on the Magazines button at the top (desktop view) or click on this link:
Then you can search from there. You will see other instances come up in the search result. It feels cludgy, not because of kbin, but I think mostly how federation between other instances goes. But I suspect that will improve with time.
That would be frustrating. I did not have the same experience. It was fairly easy for me.
That said, the admin of this instance and developer of kbin has said that they are doing some stress testing and additional troubleshooting that will impact performance. So I would venture to bet you ran into either part of that testing, or a peak load time.
All that testing needs to be done, but should pass.
Ah I gotcha. That tracks with what I had been noticing I thought was a bug.
What do you mean federation was taken down for Lemmy? I haven't noticed that.
EDIT:
Also wanted to point out that you can sub and communicate and create posts on beehaw.org posts from your lemmy.ml or lemmy.ca accounts. It is clunky, but you just have to go to search page (top right) from your account's home instance, change the type from 'All' to 'Community' and search for the remote community using their format for searching communities (i.e.: !technology@beehaw.org). The search usually returns nothing on the first search if your instance updates it's federated info with the remote instance or there are network errors. So just clear the search and try 'technology' and I have found that returns it.
KBins search function is a lot better. I have found a lot of other bugs on Lemmy, but you can work around them.
You can also sub to those lemmy communities from here. but that is a bit more in development than the lemmy to lemmy instance communication.
Yeah he’s dead along with them. He was down there.