I'm one of the people who has very recently tried Lemmy and decided to drop Reddit. Initially because I will no longer be able to use SyncForReddit, but now also because I just like the vibe a lot more here than Reddit.
I'm not a massively technical person, but I understood the broad concept of federation - different instances/servers that sync to form a big conversation/forum of sorts.
I heard a lot of people joining and saying positive things about lemmy.world, so I signed up there.....and that's it.
But, am I using it right? Is the idea to sign up in one place and use it to participate across the LemmyVerse/FediVerse? Or should I be seeking out lots of niche instances of interest?
I hear lemmy.world is the biggest instance. What if most people end up here, does that defeat the purpose? Is this inevitable?
You need a critical mass of users, so a quiet instance with few posts is not attractive. If I search for Xbox, there are lots of empty places or places with 3 posts. If there's one big one (often ends up being in lemmy.world) that's where I'm subscribing.
How are you using Lemmy, are you participating in a bunch of instances or just one?
You can't login to other instances because you don't need to. And also they don't have your login credentials (what a mess that would be). But all the content from that instance is already available to you on your homepage and you can comment on it, up vote it... Why would you want to?
I would like to provide some crucial context that I just opened Lemmy like two hours ago (made an account a week back but never actually tried to operate the site) and I am a reddifugee. I am fediverse stupid rn lol. I'm trying to learn but idk how this works and all of the examples I've seen given are other tech-based things that I don't understand either haha
So you have an account at Lemmy.world. From Lemmy.world you can subscribe, post and comment in communities on ANY Lemmy or Kbin instance (except Beehaw, for reasons).
So suppose you want to subscribe to a magazine* over at Kbin.social. You can just go ahead and subscribe to it from your Lemmy.world account and it will just work and show up in your 'subscribed' feed (and you'll be able to make posts and comments there). That's what this 'federation' thing means.
In other words, since all the instances are federated, you can see and interact with content from across the federation right on your 'home' instance.
(In fact, that's the difference between the 'local' and 'all' tabs on the homepage – 'local' is just content from that instance, while 'all' is content from across the federation.)
* 'magazine' is the Kbin term for 'community', which is equivalent to a 'subreddit'
You can interact with other instances from your home instance. However, it's easier imo to just sign up a couple of accounts across a few that you like and switch between them as you feel like it. Pretty much all the apps for you phone support multiple accounts too.
The key is to not become overly attached to one account like Reddit. Remember that any of these servers could go down permanently at any time and the important factor is the meatbag behind the account, not the account itself.