“As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications all linked together by common protocols. The most common software used in this area is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point.”
From a mastodon users point of view a Lemmy user behaves like another Mastodon user. For instance this is what my Lemmy profile looks like from mastodon:
Lemmy communities also behave kinda like users:
Even though they boost ( e.g. “retweet” ) everything that has been posted to the community. Be it a thread or a new comment.
The big upside of kbin is, that it, as you said, combines micro blogging and news aggregation. While Mastodonusers can interact with lemmy content users on lemmy can only reply to comments posted from Mastodon. We have no real way to send a toot (e.g. “tweet”) to mastodon deliberately.