Any instance can connect to any other instance by design. That includes any of the communities (sub Reddits). Any community is available from any instance.

So if you join a general instance (like reddthat.com #selfplug) you can search in the communities and find any other community and subscribe to it.

browse.feddit.de is the current place that searches every fediverse instance, and indexes all the communities. So your can find any community, even if the instance has not federated yet

> Any instance can connect to any other instance by design. That includes any of the communities (sub Reddits). Any community is available from any instance.

Which is both good and bad. Good because federation of course. But it also ends up fracturing the community. Say all the r/python people decide to move out from Reddit to Lemmy. They are probably going to go to different Lemmy instances each with their own c/python community. Yes you can follow any c/python from any instance but let's be honest, how many such c/python communities are you going to follow?

Using tags creatively might offer another handle (so bundling all #python stuff from all federated instances in a virtual "python" feed)

How do we explain what instance to join for people if they followed technology, music, and art? I have tried explaining this to friends, and there's new and unique vocabulary. I end up having to explain a bunch of other stuff too and their eyes glaze over. Is there an ELI5 or guided setup for people who don't want to deep dive into federation but want to talk about art, music, and tech (and memes)?

It's not that difficult. Lemmy is like email. You need an instance to host your account like gmail, outlook or gmx, but you can still send/receive emails with everybody else.

I appreciate the reply, but I think that's a bit oversimplified. Gmail, outlook, etc. doesn't have "topics" and the instance you join does matter to some degree, which is not the case for email.

Ideally they would join any instance and follow the topics they're interested like they would subscribing to a subreddit, and the fact that content is spread out over several instances isn't something users need to worry about.

The reality is that discovery is terrible right now and you can't browse a feed of all Tech/Music/Art threads from all federated instances. Hopefully this is being worked on.

For programming topics there is this one that is gaining traffic:

https://programming.dev/