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.

how do you follow a topic (rather than a person), reddit-style?

• I’m on kbin so it’s a little different, but you should be able to go to the communities page and search. You’ll see all communities from all federated communities. You just click on subscribe similar to Reddit.

what does all the talk on instances federating and defederating mean?

• Federated = connected and sharing a copy of posts. Defederated means one of the two instances has stopped that sharing ability with the other.

is it normal or expected that you join multiple instances to get your content? I’m juggling a few, because I can’t work out how to follow topics.

• Nope. Really no need to as long as you’re on an instance that’s federated. For example though, BeeHaw has defederated Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works so if you’re on beehaw you won’t see any of that content. If you’re on one of the other 2 you won’t get the full experience.

And if you do have different user accounts across instances, is there a way to link your own user profile between them? To give others a single view, or to make it easier to juggle all my instances?
I’ve heard it’s technically possible to follow content on Lemmy from Mastodon, for example. Is that a good way to consume content from single app?

• Mastodon is a bit different from Lemmy. It’s hard to read both from one app. Kbin is working on that issue by allowing microblogs. Still not perfect yet.

I’m gonna try and answer your questions one by one

Let me preface with the fediverse pyramid. It goes projects (like Lemmy, mastodon, kbin which is what you’re on, etc). Then on all of these are instances which are like micro websites / servers. These instances host communities. You make your account on an instance which hosts all your information and posts, but you can interact with other instances

YES you can follow any community that’s made inside of an instance that isn’t your own. You’re on kbin so I’m not sure exactly how that looks for you but if I wanted to sub to this community for example I would put [email protected] in the search bar

Federation is what allows these separate instances to talk to each other. If a community and another community have interests that directly counter each other, one might defederate with another. That means that if your account is hosted on one you can’t interact with the other. Accounts that aren’t on either are unaffected

No. Especially if they’re on the same project. I made this mistake too lol. Some projects are not able to post onto other projects right now, mostly because they update separately so sometimes they fall out of sync. Right now Lemmy users can’t make a post to mastodon, but mastodon users can post to Lemmy. I think kbin users can post to both

Also no, sorry. You’ll have to delete those extra accounts ^^; if you want to have different formated accounts (like how kbin has a magazine and Mastodon has a blog) you can’t link them. Personally I think of it like having a reddit account and a Twitter

Yes, you just have to search for the group like I said in response to question one

Any follow up questions just ask

This site is a bit more extensive.

On Lemmy you can’t and I’ve gotten the impression they won’t be adding it either. You can on mastodon and plethora