this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
-12 points (31.2% liked)
Asklemmy
54356 readers
368 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm new to this whole "federation" thing. When I joined Lemmy I just followed a guide where it said it made no difference which instance I made my account in. Is that not true?
It's only true in that you can interact with other federated instances on any federated account, but not all instances are federated with every instance. I can see Hexbear.net just fine from here, as can I see Lemmygrad.ml, but you will never see them from Lemmy.world accounts.
There's also the fact that many instances vary in how they run things, what their local sort is like, etc.
Ngl, that sounds needlessly complicated. Anyway, thank you for your answer.
its not, really. and its something you get used to and come to appreciate.
the city analogy is a great one - every town has its own flavor. many towns build roads (federation) between them so all inhabitants can easily travel to each other... as a city.
some towns self-isolate or are isolated from other towns (defederated) for all sorts of reasons and, if you want to see what they have to offer, you can set up a house directly in that town or another town with a road to (federated with) that town. it really does allow some very cool places to thrive - like the internet was before it was purchased.
lemmy{dot}.world chooses to keep things pretty... bland? thats their right, but there is quite a bit of quality spiciness out there if you have a house in a well connected (widely federated) town or decide to set up a few additional houses in some of the more exotic towns.
does anyone have a federation graph up and running right now? should be easy-ish based on instance published federation lists.
No worries! It makes it more complicated to start, but it also has its strengths.
It makes no difference in your ability to access some amount of content, basically.
The "Fediverse" is like a collection of cities, most of them pretty small. "Federation" refers to the roads between them. When an instance federates with another, the users of each instance are allowed to view and comment on each other's posts.
There are a few toxic circle-jerk communities no one federates with, like Truth Social, and there are a few gooey growths of bot-filled cancer, like Meta's Threads, and there are nice instances like lemmy.ml or hexbear where it's possible to have educational conversations.
(my vague grasp of federation, semantics may be wrong)