Think of it more like email addresses. Know how a Gmail account can send email to an iCloud account just fine, and both display the same content? Same basic concept. You can have [account]@domain1.com and [account]@domain2.com, and they’re entirely separate accounts. Even if they have the same username, they’re on different instances.

Federation refers to how the instances share data with each other. One of the largest things to look for is what instances your instance federates with, because that will determine what kinds of users you end up interacting with.

[–] taermina@feddit.uk 3 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

Ahh, okay, so if I wanted to go just looking at a specific subject it might be better to make a second account and join another instance, and keep up two accounts?

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Most instances will federate with a pretty wide variety of other instances. There are a few big instances to watch out for, but for the most part the instance choice is primarily about which admin team you prefer. As long as your home instance federates with a server, you’ll be able to see it.

In particular, watch out for Hexbear and the .ml instances. Those will be some of the more extreme and/or brigade-y. There have historically been issues with brigading from some of the more extreme instances. Even calling them extreme is a sort of contentious statement, and I’ll likely get a few “how dare you, fascist, tankie, TERF, etc” types of comments if they stumble across it.

Aside from brigading, the most common reasons for defederation are related to legality (like maybe a certain instance allows porn that would be blocked in your home instance,) or unmoderated trolling. Trolling from new instances used to be a big problem, where an admin would make a server as a side project and leave it to stew. Trolls would make bot accounts on that fledgling instance, and use them to troll other instances. And since that small instance’s admin is just doing it as a side project, they’re not keeping active tabs on anything and the troll accounts are able to run rampant. Bans didn’t federate by default, so every single instance would need to individually ban the trolls.

Also, one particular quirk of federation is that federated instances can act as a proxy for defederated instances. For instance, you’re on feddit.uk, which defederates from Threads. So you won’t see Threads content normally. But maybe another instance does allow Threads, and feddit.uk is federated with them. If a Threads user posts on that second instance, you’ll also be able to see it. Because even though your home instance blocks Threads, that second instance allows it and you see it by proxy.

[–] DiaDeLosMuertos@aussie.zone 1 points 29 minutes ago

Thanks for all this info but I have to say, I am soooo confused.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 5 hours ago

You don't need another account. Example to access a community on lemm.ee:

https://feddit.uk/c/casualconversation@lemm.ee

Which is the same content as https://lemm.ee/c/casualconversation

[–] pseudo@jlai.lu 5 points 6 hours ago

With an account at feddit.uk, it should be ok to navigated almost whatever community. The list of block instances is short and mostly block pedoporn.