Selfhosted

Or lib.lgbt!

More seriously it’s basically all the same. Just depends what @ you want after your username.

I'm new here, can someone explain how this whole federating thing works?

I’ve been on mastodon for a couple of years, here’s how I handled instance fomo there. I made an account on a few different instances that I liked, got a feel for each instance’s rules, what was allowed, what wasn’t. Over time, I started to realize what kind of mod styles I liked, whether I cared much about the local timeline vs my subscribed timeline (I didn’t care as much about this on masto, but here, I’m much more interested in the local timeline, which I’ll get into in a bit.) Eventually, I settled on just one account, but really you never have to if you don’t want to, lots of people have alts, even back on non federated social media.

I’m doing this process again here. I currently have accounts on Beehaw, Kbin.social, and slrpnk.net, where I’m posting from currently. No matter which one, I can follow any community I want from any of these accounts provided they aren’t defederated. But, I also get a unique local timeline view, and a specific culture brought on by mods and users for each. I really think this gives power to smaller, more topic focused instances like slrpnk.net. Specifically, I’ve noticed two things it gives me that Reddit didn’t necessarily have

1. a quick “show me only posts related to this specific topic I’m interested in” button via the local timeline. (This could technically kind of be built with multireddits, but that wouldn’t quite be the same)
2. (what I think is even better) show me more general topics, but hosted by people also interested in this one specific root topic (for my instance, the root topic would be solarpunk, but for others, I’ve seen instances dedicated to star trek, cyberpunk, local towns, the list goes on.) This I think has more community building power in an a way that is unique to here and that I’m interested in seeing more of, personally. After all, someone could make a subreddit called, idk, r/startrekurbanism, but I don’t see that taking off on Reddit. It would be weirdly extremely niche, and the chances of it showing up on your TL (which you need to happen to encourage engagement) over more popular posts is minimal. Here though, I bet a community dedicated to discussing city planning and design ran by Star Trek fans could have some engagement just due to the local timeline bringing it to people’s attention. This has potential to allow Lemmy to be weird and unique in a way previous aggregator sites couldn’t pull off.

Tl;dr: local timelines are cool. try a few instances out to get a feel for what you like (and to get over instance fomo), and give fedi time to grow on you. It may not work out for everyone, and that’s okay, but I really have grown to prefer Mastodon to Twitter, and I’m excited to see a federated alternative to Reddit gain traction.

The instance you sign up on doesn't really matter. For technical people, the server you sign in on, can be important, but for the average user it doesn't. In fact, you could make an account on mastodon.social and comment on this very thread. That's pretty much the goal of federation.