Somehow people should be made more aware of this. You need just one account and it does not matter where you create it as long as you can trust that the server stays up.

That isn’t 100%. Instances can be blocked from federating. For instance if you are on lemmy.world you are no longer getting beehive posts because beehive disabled federation with lemmy.world

I think kbin has the best interface and I am hoping they get “multireddits” implemented soon so you can combine communities from multiple servers into a single view

I've been wondering. What does defederation do exactly? Does it only block posting from the defederated instance or does it block both posting and browsing too?

Blocking interactions would be understandable but also blocking read-only subscriptions seem like a mistake.

It's like a traditional social media block but for whole servers. Basically it totally severs the federation between the instances, making it look to each other like they never existed.

That's unfortunate. Hurray for RSS I guess.

Is there a guide to do this for dummies? Subscribing is one thing, but is it possible to "comment" on another instance's community?

Edit: Figured out myself. It wasn't that difficult :) I agree with others that this needs to be mentioned more often. But, when I searched for "dotnet" in lemmy.world, it didn't return "https://kbin.social/m/dotnet" as one of the search results. Is this due to defederation? Is there a way to add a community using a unique identifier instead of searching for it?

You can search local communities, or all communities. If someone else has previously searched and found the remote community you're looking for, it'll appear immediately. If they haven't, you need to already know the url (or short alias) for that community, and search for that... And then it'll take a while to federate, and then anyone can find it with an easy search from there.

It's kind of complicated, but is only a problem for new instances and new communities. After everything is established, it'll be a lot easier.

I tried to search with the full URL and it didn't show up. That's why I thought it wasn't the way to do it. But I can now see it when I search for it. So, you are right, it takes some time.

Yeah, that's incredibly unintuitive, and I only know it works that way because I've seen a few people say it does.

I expect the software will continue to improve, though, so these rough edges will eventually be taken care of. I hope. :D

You can also follow Kbin Magazines and Lemmy Communities (subreddit) from Mastodon. They are Groups on Mastodon. I am not sure about posting a top level, but I can comment.

No you can't. If the community is hosted on an instance that doesn't federate with the one you have an account on, you can't interact with that community.