Primarily I’m wondering if certain instances have reputations that might color what people think about my community just by virtue of it being hosted on a particular instance.
There’s also the question of instance-wide content moderation or something, not like I’m trying to be edgy, but like some instances might not like curse words or discussions about heavy topics like suicide, or something.
Also I’m wondering if it’s somehow harder for people from other instances to find communities (I understand that subscribing is easy, but finding may be different?)
Appreciate details…
It can theoretically alter it in any way. I mean, that’s up to the instance admin.
Read the instance rules in the sidebar of the main page, and see if you’re okay with them. That won’t tell you everything, but it might give you a rough idea of the specifics of the instance. For mbin instances, rather than the sidebar, look at /terms, like https://fedia.io/terms for fedia.io.
I personally avoid communities on lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml if possible, and am not currently subscribed to any. Your home instance is lemmy.world, which is outright defederated with all but lemmy.ml, so you won’t even see some of those. I’m fine with other instances. But that’s gonna vary on a personal basis, so there’s no global answer for that.
Still learning. How are you here from lemmy.today if lemmy.world is defederated (maybe I don’t know what defederated means)
Every user creates an account on one instance. You did so on lemmy.world, which is the largest instance out there, a popular one. That is their home instance.
Posts and comments from other instances will be visible to an instance as long as the two instances are federated – that is, the instance admins have not explicitly cut them off from each other. Lemmy.world and lemmy.today are federated.
Normally, any user from any instance can see and post to any community on a federated instance.
A given community on a source instance will not actually see its content be copied to a destination instance until at least one user on the destination instance has subscribed to that community – this helps reduce bandwidth usage on the network. I’m subscribed to [email protected], and probably other users on lemmy.today are as well, so we can see this community.
EDIT: Oh, sorry, I think I see the confusion. I meant that of the instances I listed, lemmy.world was defederated with all except lemmy.ml, not that it was defederated with all instances out there except lemmy.ml.
You can see instance relationships at /instances, so for lemmy.world, https://lemmy.world/instances
You tried your hardest at the end there to not say “for instance” didn’t you
Thanks for the explanation and link
Wait, I see community posts on instances that are defederated with lemmy.world. is It because I had to search for them and subscribe?
Edit: how are defederated instance’s posts crossposted on Lemmy.world?