Bistro

I can try to answer some if not all your questions to the best of my knowledge as someone who also got more into the Fediverse more recently.

• When you mean follow a topic, do you mean like how on Reddit you just follow a subreddit? On what you would call a subbreddit is what on Kbin are called Magazines and is how you follow a topic. I’m not sure if that answers your question though.

• Federating and De-federating is in regards to Instances/servers closing themselves off to other instances/servers. An example of this currently is Beehaw.org closing itself off to lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. What this means is if you are for example a user who account is on lemmy.world and try to look at a community on beehaw.org like !technology.beehaw.org, you will see the community and its post but you’ll only be looking at old cached posts from before the de-federation between the instances/servers happened. This same thing goes for Beehaw because de-federating goes both ways.

• There is nothing wrong with having multiple accounts across different platforms but instances might be a little much unless you’re in an instance who is de-federated from an instance you want to interact with. But of course that’s all down to choice.

• This is something that a lot of people want but currently is not possible. Hopefully in the future something like that is possible but for now the only you can do (which is something I do with different fediverse platforms) is link in your bios the different places you have accounts. Not everybody looks at peoples accounts though but its a start.

• It can be yes if thats what you prefer. I personally like consuming the content on their respective platforms i.e posts from Mastodon on Mastodon, posts on Kbin on Kbin, etc because I prefer using them with their own U.I’s. But if you prefer to keeps central on one account you can very do that because thats the power of the fediverse/ActivityPub.

I hope I didn’t ramble on too much and its readable/understandably to read. I’m not an expert or super knowledgeable person on fediverse stuff but I try.