We have Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, I think even yiffit.net. If I log in using wefwef it asks me where I want to login. And when I make a new account using another instance, it says ”… Lemmy is federated, so you can interact with everything on lemmy.ml even if you’re registered on a different instance.“ So if I’m registered on lemmy.world, how can I interact with lemmy.ml?
It is “just like email” in a sense you can send email from your gmail to someone using yahoo, hotmail or even their own self hosted server and it still gets delivered despite all those different servers. And that’s where analogy of similarity to email ends.
I can (could) post to reddit with Boost, my friend uses Apolo, this other guy uses RIF. To the layman what’s the difference between my instance, your instance, wefwef, jerboa, etc. The general public don’t know about email servers any more than Lemmy instances.
Well, yes, but no.
Analogy of friends using Boost, Apolo, RiF is like accessing their emails with Outlook, the other guy with Thunderbird and the last one within browser through webmail. It doesn’t say much, just the piece of software used to connect to the server.
In case of Reddit, there was just one server/entity - Reddit. It’s like if you and all your friends had (for example) gmail. You could still use Outlook or Thunderbird or any other mail app to access it, but all of you would communicate throughout google server - gmail to gmail. And there would be no option to communicate with someone having hotmail, fastmail or any other provider.
But when you send email (from any of those applications) it connects and delivers to any other email server. Be it gmail, hotmail, yahoo, zoho, someones garage server, or whatever else. And this is the same here. It doesn’t really matter whether you sign up at lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemm.ee or sh.itjust.works - you can still access, view and communicate with people from different servers. Just like you can send emails between different providers.
So in general, normal non-tech-savvy people should semi-randomly pick any instance they happen to stumble upon and they should be fine.