I’ve been using and enjoying both. I’ve used Lemmy way more because it has a public API which means mobile apps. Kbin is a bit more to my liking and it’s great on desktop, but it regrettably doesn’t have a public API at the moment. Mastodon is okay as a Twit stand-in but having to brute-force a feed is a learning curve.
Glad I could help!
If for example you’re on lemmyworld and they defederate from Threads, you won’t see any Threads content, even if you sub to people on, say, kbinsocial who boost Threads content.
If you view those same profiles from say, shitjustworks, and they haven’t defederated, you will see all of their content plus the Threads content.
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Unfortunately money makes the world go round. Part of the meaning of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” means that no matter who you are, no matter what kind of service you employ, no matter what you try and do for yourself, somewhere along the line capitalism comes in and causes someone to suffer. It’s pervasive and insidious.
If instances are completely supported by user donations, that’s great. But they will never match the billions of dollars that corps can toss around.
The only real way to prevent corporate influence on anything is to abolish corporations and/or capitalism. In the meantime, though, we as users can take steps to mitigate their influence: discuss proactively, agree to defederate at a moment’s notice, and server admins can refuse bribes/offers/etc.
So theoretically you should be able to make one account and view a majority of content. This is barring of course any instances or communities defederated from your home instance.
There’s merit in making a community for your interest on your home instance even if you’re subscribed to it on a different instance, for reasons like outages and a diversity of content. Lemmy being bigger than other instances just means there’s more content available here, but if you like the layout of kbin or Mastodon or what have you better you can still see it all.
Plus, just because two instances are federated doesn’t mean the users actually see all the information exchanged. You have to actually opt into it which is cool- ie if an instances particular community is problematic you can just block it and sub to the rest.
Edit: got so wrapped up in my TED talk I forgot to mention- I’m currently trying out Lemmy, sh.itjust.works, and kbin.social until I can settle on one (hopefully kbin gets an app soon lol.)
Probably uses the Lemmy API to detect which instance you’re logged into or you log in directly when prompted.