I know it’s been asked a million times already but would I need to create different accounts for different instances? Please feel free to shout at me, call me dumb or whatever if that gets your rocks off, but I just wanna know how it works 😅
Think of it like your email provider: you can still get email from Hotmail even if you have an AOL.com account.
Where this analogy breaks down is that some instances have defederated from others. This means “we don’t want your data, and we won’t import it.”
But if you pick an instance that is widely federated then you can see and interact with most of Lemmy.
Just to defend your metaphor, email providers also sometimes defederate from specific others, due to spam/abuse.
This was an enjoyable explanation
Hello from Lemmy.ml!
We’re seeing each other’s content even though we’re using different websites and different apps. That’s the fediverse for ya!
Hello back at ya! I like your username 👀
So basically it’s better to have different accounts in different instances to get the most of Lemmy, I’m guessing?
No. Technically you only need one account for the entire Fediverse, but in reality you need one per service you use in depth. So one for Lemmy, one for Mastodon, one for Pixelfed, etc.
Ahh I see, from what I’ve read, is mastodon kinda more like twitter or no?
Yeah, Mastodon is like Twitter, Pixelfed is like IG, Owncast is like Twitch, Friendica is like Facebook etc. They all connect and talk to each other to some extent, but you’re not going to get a great experience using Pixelfed (and app for photos) to stay up to date on someone’s Mastodon post.
An instance is a server. You can always communicate with everyone on your own server. You can also communicate with everyone on any other server yours is connected to. Not every server is connected to every other; but most are connected to most.
You don’t need an account on each one, but you may want to set up a second account on an instance you like to use as a backup. I have accounts on midwest.social, slrpnk.net, and piefed.social; they all see the same content 99% of the time. But every so often midwest goes down for maintenance, or slrpnk has a firewall issue, and on those days I just switch accounts and keep going.
An instance is like an island. Few instances have connections to every island out there, yours in particular has removed your ability to see anything posted on the communist instances. What you see on “Local” is what’s posted on Lemmy.world, what you see on “All” is every island your island is connected to.
The benefit of local searching is that some instances have themes, like Hexbear.net with communism/anarchism, Lemmygrad.ml with Marxism-Leninism, slrpnk.net with the solarpunk movement, or mander.xyz with science. You can scroll locally and see what you’re interested in, or you can go to all and see what other instances are saying, and participate in their communities.
I’m not calling you dumb, but you should interact more with people. 4h ago you made a post:
“Reddit employee” scared that people are gonna move to Lemmy soon.
But instead of ineracting with the comments you got - many of them partially explaining what you are now asking - you just make another lazy post. And you haven’t interact here with anyone either.
edit: lol, of course OP would reply now that I called them out.
So sorry about that, I was a bit busy with other things at the time enough not to interact and reply back. But then again that’s no excuse on my end since I did make another post not shortly after.
There are similar answers to what the other commenters have said and I’m thankful for their help (and yours) and I will get to each of them if I can but I don’t wanna sound like a broken record since I’m gonna have the same if not similar reply to each of them. Excuse me in advance for not having a better imagination 😊
