I am sorry to hear that. PieFed has way better onboarding tools, see e.g. https://piefed.zip/ - even if you want to keep your current account, you can still use that PieFed instance to discover communities and content that you will enjoy.
Comment on Just a friendly welcome post
GandalfsPipe09@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m not having a good time but I am indeed here
OpenStars@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Well you got an account made, and that’s a start! Lemmy’s UI may feel familiar if you’re an old.reddit user. There are apps like Voyager that feel like spiritual successors to AlienBlue and Apollo, so if you used those apps before they were killed, you’ll feel right at home.
The best way I’ve seen to describe the platform is to think of it like email. An @gmail account can send email to an @yahoo account just fine. The specific platform is agnostic because they all use the same email backend. That’s essentially how federation works, with a bunch of different servers/instances agreeing to use the same data sharing backend.
So you’re on lemmy.zip, so you’ll be able to see and interact with any instances that lemmy.zip is federated with. Federation is simply the decision to actively share that data. And defederation is when a server chooses not to share data with another instance. One of the biggest impacts your server choice makes is which instances it is federated/defederated with. That will determine which communities you can access, as you’ll only be able to see communities on local or federated instances.
The one big caveat is that defederating from an instance won’t stop you seeing posts from those users on another instance. For example, I’m on dbzer0. Let’s say dbzer0 and zip decide to defederate. You’d stop seeing communities on dbzer0, and vice versa. But if I posted to lemmy.world, you’d be able to see my post as long as you’re still federated with lemmy.world. The third instance (lemmy.world, in this example) essentially acts as a proxy to allow both to see each other. So defederation isn’t the same thing as a filter or block, as it only stops you from seeing things that are posted on that defederated instance.