The main difference between instances is the moderation policy and who runs it really, but nobody is generally missing out anything depending on the instance they choose.

There is one exception to the above, which is when instances defederate each other. Imagine that instance A is full of content that is not accepted on B and C, B and C can defederate A to stop "talking to it". Currently beehaw has defederated Lemmy.world because of the amount of users and moderation capabilities, for example.

[–] mazkarth 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

So would "communityA" on beehaw have different content to "CommunityA" on Lemmy.world due to the defederation/(block)

[–] kring 8 points 2 years ago

So would “communityA” on beehaw have different content to “CommunityA” on Lemmy.world due to the defederation/(block)

Even with federation, [email protected] would be a completely different community from [email protected]. (like email: [email protected] is a completely different account to [email protected])

What federation does for you is that you, on lemmy.world, can access them both with a single login. (email: you can write a mail to [email protected] from within your gmail webmail)

[–] PropaGandalf 7 points 2 years ago

jokes on them, they can't even see communities on lemmy.world however we can still see their posts