Yeah it's all federated. If you get banned from a community on Lemmy.world, you will not be able to access it from Lemmy.today for example (with your lemmy.today user account).

This is the really super cool part about the fediverse. People don't realize.. This is where the magic is.

If Lemmy.world is down, you still access posts and threads and make posts etc from lemmy.today.. And it all syncs when Lemmy.world is up again.

Another mind blowing moment is when you realize you can read and post on Lemmy from Mastadon.... So you can combine interacting with Mastadon and Lemmy in the same conversion.

I guess you need to do some more research on how Lemmy works.

You can follow any community from any instance. For now you could create an account at some lesser populated instances, I had one on lemmy.ml, made another account on monyet.cc. It's a minor inconvenience that you have to subscribe to communities but other than that my experience with lemmy has been very good.

Local communities are totally irrelevant when deciding which instance should host your account.

Reread their last sentence.

What instance you use as your home instance is irrelevant unless it has been defederated from an unusual amount of instances. You likely don't want to try and use lemmygrad as your home lol.

Otherwise, home instance is only going to determine your local feed. Which is pretty much the least used feed anywhere other than maybe beehaw. Discovery via all combined with searches lets you populate your subscribed feed, so those are the ones that you'll use most.

Lemmy is federated by design. If you try and treat instances like some kind of dedicated site the way reddit was, you might as well not use it at all because you'll be missing out on the benefits federation brings to the format.

Are you old enough to remember geocities? It had these circles where individual sites within geocities would link to each other. You would have your own site, but be linked to maybe hundreds of others. That's closer to what lemmy is than the kind of reddit experience you're probably used to.

You think theyre all siloed off from each other or something? I'm literally the only user on my instance and there is 1 community with 0 posts yet here I am, on another instance.

Yeah it's just getting started, and you can start new communities if you like. But no point starting ones that already exists on other instances.

The amount of local communities doesn't matter much, Im subscribed to like 100 remote communities anyway. :)