@mattmcal kbin magazines have “tags” that they can set. mastodon posts can use hashtags and do so as their way of searching/sorting stuff. so kbin pulls in posts with particular hashtags into the magazines that have the related tags. sometimes this sorting doesn’t work, so kbin just puts them into the @random magazine.

As for the difference between articles/threads and microblog posts, I’m not sure how they’re handled in the activitypub protocol (I think they’re all marked as different?) but they’re functionally all shared between instances. our threads here on kbin show up in mastodon as posts retweeted by a particular user and then replies to those posts.

notably, threads are newer and seem to have more information associated with them.