If you turn federation off you only see content from the server that you are on. For your case, this means content only from the kbin.social server. I’m on kbin.dk, so if I turn federation off I wont see any content from kbin.social, but only content from my own server where we currently only are a couple of users.

Federation (through the ActivityPub protocol) allows you to subscribe to content from other servers. If you, e.g., subscribe to the magazine @musik from my server, then kbin.social will create a local magazine and start receiving new content posted on my server.

Federation also allows me to comment on your post on kbin.social without using an account there. I am using (https://kbin.dk/u/cnk)[https://kbin.dk/u/cnk]. Since federation happens through a standardized protocol, you can also subscribe to content from servers running different ActivityPub software. The closest cousin is Lemmy that’s also a forum/link aggregator. But you can also communicate with, e.g., Mastodon that is a microblogging platform.

Federation is the process that pulls content in from other servers (e.g. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, fedia.io, mastodon.social, etc.) All of these different servers can communicate and share content with each other.

If you turn federation off, you only see content from your “home” server, which in your case is kbin.social (in mine it’s remy.city).

When you turn federation off, your users can only see activity and posts from your own instance.

Federation is what enable you to seamlessly interact with all the other instances. This can also be set at yhe instance level, to pick and choose which other instances your instance can talk to.

As I understand it, it’s a bit like email in that there is a protocol to allow different servers/websites to communicate, allowing the user to access the whole collection of Lemmies but meaning there is not one corporation or person in charge of the Lemmiverse.

This has advantages in that someone can’t pull a Spez, but disadvantages in that it can make stopping bad actors from affecting other instances.

Someone else will probably make a clearer explanation, and I’m happy to be corrected on any of this.

Welcome! In a network, federation means to be able to send messages and interconnect with each other. Kbin is a content agreggator that works with this model in mind. There is not one “kbin”, there are many kbin servers -they’re called instances-, each hosting their own magazines and providing the service to their users. But kbin instances FEDERATE with each other. So the magazines in one instance can be seen, and interacted with, another instance.

kbin follows a protocol that allows it to federate not only with other kbin instances, but with Lemmy instances (Lemmy being other content aggregator, but with tiny differences) among others. This means you can also follow communities (Lemmy’s equivalent of magazines) from Lemmy’s instances from your kbin instance. As an example, here I am, from a Lemmy instance (feddit.cl) interacting with you and your post in the m/kbin magazine at the kbin instance kbin.social.

Turning federation off means turning all the instances you see off. Now it’s just your instance, not seeing the rest of the instances.

Some instances defederate with another because of disagreement in terms of services, codes of conduct or other moderation issues. Some instances defederate with another because of it being bot farms and other spurious usage. So it’s not unusual to see some news like “X instance defederates with Y instance”.

You might want to be mindful of how your instance is run if this is an issue for you. Anyway, you might want to read on federation by looking it up, and moreover, read on fediverse -which is the word used by these open services like kbin on Lemmy- that use open protocols to federate with each other.

Again, welcome, and have fun.