Okay, so forgive my ignorance, this is all pretty new for me.
Obviously a lot of us are here as Reddit refugees. People looking for a discussion forum that scratches that itch. Fediverse sounds pretty neat. Only I’m not really sure what to make of these instances. Basically, I need a separate account for each Lemmy instance? So if for some reason .world doesn’t have what I’m looking for, I literally need to make a new account on someone else’s instance? For example, my login doesn’t work on lemmy.ca. Isn’t the point that you can comment on anyone’s post no matter what because it’s all run through Activity Pub? Or do I have to make my own instance to federate other people’s instances? Super weird.
Am I missing something here? I just want to have a place where I have 1 login and I can see the entire internet’s worth of interesting stuff. Like Reddit.
If the instance you chose is lemmy.world, that is where you login. I chose lemmy.world because it seemed to run smoother than lemmy.ml at the time I made my account. Other than that it really doesn’t matter what instance you create an account on.
Think of instances like email providers. On the front end, you are logging in to your provider. On the back end, all the providers can talk to each other through a common protocol. They can send and receive emails from any other server.
If you are on lemmy.world, you can view, see, and subscribe to content from any server. You can post and comment on any server, but your name will say @lemmy.world if that’s your home instance.
From a user standpoint. Make sure you go to lemmy.world, login, and find your content from there. Either through sorting by all or subscribed, or the communities button at the top looking at “all” not “local”. If you are a member of lemmy.world and type lemmy.ml into the address bar of your browser it will ask you to log into lemmy.ml when you get there because you are on their site instead at that point. Kinda like having an outlook account and going to gmail.com. You can send and receive email from a Gmail user, but you can’t directly go into their site and login just because outlook shares a protocol with them.